


Salvage

by chiiyo86



Category: Stranger Things (TV 2016)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Dissociation, Eleven gets her powers back, F/M, Feelings Realization, Friendship, Getting Together, M/M, Multi, Panic Attacks, Polyamory, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Rescue, The Upside Down, Underage making out, Will & Eleven don't leave Hawkins, Will has Powers, figuring out sexual orientation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-24
Updated: 2020-01-11
Packaged: 2021-02-26 00:54:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 8
Words: 61,518
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21544837
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/chiiyo86/pseuds/chiiyo86
Summary: Halloween is approaching and the mood is gloomy in Hawkins. Everyone is still reeling from the summer's events, Will struggles with the anniversary effect, Eleven mourns Hopper and the loss of her powers, and Mike is coming to some very uncomfortable realizations about himself and his feelings. When Will and Eleven separately receive signs that Hopper might not be dead but trapped in the Upside Down, the party will have to rally together despite turmoils created by the romantic entanglement between Will, Eleven and Mike.
Relationships: Will Byers & Eleven | Jane & Dustin Henderson & Maxine Mayfield & Lucas Sinclair & Mike Wheeler, Will Byers/Eleven | Jane Hopper/Mike Wheeler
Comments: 42
Kudos: 109





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I've been watching and enjoying the show since the beginning with no desire to write fic, and then season 3 happened and this is what comes out of it. Maybe not what fandom wanted or needed, but this is all I've got and I hope you enjoy it. :) Expect regular updates because I have the fic mostly written.

He couldn’t be blamed for being caught off guard—it really shouldn’t be snowing in _October_ , after all. 

The thing that caught his attention was his classmates looking excitedly out the window and squealing in delight. One moment later it caught the attention of their English teacher, who first asked his students to please focus on the lesson before he peered outside and said, sounding surprised and a little awed, “Oh, it’s snowing. Winter is coming early, this year.”

So Will knew it was only snow well before he had a look at it. It wasn’t even snowing much, just a few idly drifting flakes. Although, it actually might have been preferable if the snow had been thicker and had fallen harder, because then it would have looked less like— _they seemed to be rising from the ground as much as they fell from the dark, crowded sky, snowflakes or ashes, floating in front of his eyes, drawing his attention away from the black vines that crept on everything and—_

“Will?”

Mike’s voice. Mike was there. He hadn’t been there in the Upside Down. Will took a slow breath. The classroom chatter that had faded for a moment roared in his ears. His sweaty hands had left damp traces on the surface of his desk and he wiped them with his sleeve, his cheeks aflame with embarrassment. 

“I’m okay,” he said, the reply so automatic that it spilled out of his mouth without input from his brain. 

He was still half-turned toward the window, closer from it than Mike was, and Mike shouldn’t be able to see his face but the events of the last couple of years had left him pretty attuned to sudden shifts in Will’s mood. It was a fact that Will in turn resented and was grateful for. 

“You don’t look okay,” Mike said, his eyebrows twisting with a frown. 

Will didn’t feel okay. The vision had dissolved with Mike’s voice, but the _feelings_ were still there—the cold that numbed his fingertips, weighed down his stomach, made the hair on the back of his neck stand up. It was very similar to what the Mind Flayer felt like, one of his brain’s nastier ways to trick him, but Will had now learned to tell the two apart. When it was the Mind Flayer, it ended as quickly as it had started, a brush of cold against his neck, like the feeling was the Mind Flayer’s creepy way of saying ‘hi there.’ When it was just one of Will’s brain tricks, though, it tended to linger like a bad aftertaste, sometimes for hours. Will could already tell that this one was going to last him for the rest of the day, but at least he was sure that there was no tentacled, mind-controlling monster around. Small favors. 

“I’m fine,” he insisted. 

Mike, not so easily fooled, scanned the classroom with severe eyes. “Is it the snow?” he asked.

Will had never described the Upside Down to Mike, not in details, but maybe El had—or maybe Mike was astute enough to realize that the snow was the new factor in their familiar classroom environment. It couldn’t have been the teacher, or their classmates, or the American flag hanging by the door, or the title of the book they were studying, _Great Expectations_ , written in chalk block letters on the blackboard. The snow was the only disturbance.

“It’s stupid,” Will mumbled. “It’s just snow.” He risked a glance outside and saw that it had stopped already. “And it’s over, now. No big deal.”

Mike gave him a suspicious look, obviously far from being convinced, but their teacher had resumed the lesson and Will pretended to be too absorbed in it to notice. In truth, he didn’t register much of anything for the rest of the hour. The remainder of the afternoon wasn’t any better; as he’d predicted, Will kept feeling awful, his body a foreign weight that he had to hurl around, and most of his energy was focused on keeping other people from noticing too much. His friends probably could tell that something was off, but by now they were used to him getting very quiet for no apparent reason. Max, for one, had come into the picture after the Upside Down and might even think that this was what he’d always been like—it wasn’t her fault, of course, but sometimes the thought made Will angry. He wished that bold, daredevil Max could have known the boy he used to be.

After class, Lucas, Dustin and Max suggested going to the arcade but Will declined, pretexting homework to catch up on. Mike also said he couldn’t go, and for a moment Will thought that he meant to go back home with him to see Eleven, but Mike explained with a disgruntled expression that his mom wanted him to sort out his toys for a yard sale.

“ _Again_ ,” he said with heartfelt emphasis. “It’s like she wants me to get rid of every single thing I have!”

“You do have a lot of stuff,” Max said. “No one needs that much stuff.”

Will excused himself during the ensuing fight, hopping on his bike and addressing a little wave to the group. As he did, Mike briefly made eye contact, flashing him a smile that held a hint of ‘ _are you okay?’_ Will responded with a shrug before he pressed down on his pedal and rode away. The sound of Mike bickering with Max followed him for a few minutes, an oddly comforting background rumble. 

His thoughts didn’t quiet at all on his way home. Since he’d been allowed to ride his bike again he hadn’t used the shortcut through Mirkwood, and yet his mind conjured images of him doing it, speeding between the trees until the shape of a faceless monster separated from one of the trunks. It wasn’t a flashback and Will knew it wasn’t real, but the images were annoyingly intrusive, rushing to the forefront of his mind when he was trying to think about absolutely anything else, like a revolving door slamming into his back when he pushed it too hard. By the time Will got home, he was on edge, irritated and anxious and exhausted at the same time.

The whole month had been a downhill slope. The ‘anniversary effect,’ Dr. Owens had called it, and the man had been wrong about a lot of things but apparently not about that. Will hated it. He wished he could forget the date, ignore the inexorable approach of Halloween and November, the way the leaves turned red and then yellow, the chillier air, the shorter days, and how it all affected him. And he’d thought he was doing so much better! Even their fight against the Mind Flayer during the summer had only gotten him a few weeks of nightmares, and not the worst that he’d ever had. Some nightmares after an encounter with a monster was okay—he knew the others had their share too. _This_ was normal; what wasn’t normal was his mind turning against him because of a stupid page on the calendar, when the rest of his everyday life was completely, boringly ordinary. No military, no monsters, no alternate dimensions. High school wasn’t a major change from middle school, since it was pretty much the same people that he’d known for years moving in with them. They still got teased a lot, but the party stuck together and Max’s capacity for viciousness held the nastier bullies at bay. Jonathan and Nancy were at school with them now, which was nice. Nancy and Mike tended to roll their eyes at each other when they crossed paths, but Will liked being able to see his brother during the day. He was glad not to have seen him today, though, because Jonathan would have noticed right away that something was wrong and would have wanted to fix it. 

“I’m home,” Will said absentmindedly from the front door.

At this time of the day, Mom and Jonathan would both be working and only Eleven would be there. Will would usually do his homework when he came back, chatting about his day with Eleven, telling her everything their friends had said or done—with a special attention to Mike—so it would feel just like she’d been there too. He would then help her with the homework that Mom or Jonathan had given her so she could hope to enroll in school with them next year; they’d already devised the lie about where she came from, making her a distant orphaned relative of Hopper’s that he’d promised to take care of before his death. 

Today, Will didn’t feel like chatting. He didn’t feel like doing his homework either, in no state of mind to focus on math or English or biology. He made a beeline for his room and dropped his backpack on the floor.

“Will? Is that you?”

The house was too small for everyone to have their own room now that Eleven lived with them, so Jonathan had given her his room and slept in the living room, when he wasn’t at Nancy’s. A hand on the doorknob, Will hesitated; if he closed the door, El would leave him alone, but if he didn’t, she would come and talk to him for sure. In the end he left it slightly ajar and went on his bed, grabbing paper and his pencil case on the way. His hand went automatically for the black pencil, but he made himself put it back. He didn’t want to get into yet another obsessive drawing spree of long, smoky tentacles and their endless writhing. Since he knew he wouldn’t be able to focus on anything but the Mind Flayer, he tried for a compromise and started drawing it as the big, hulking monster that they’d fought at the mall with fireworks—a positive, cathartic memory. It had felt _so_ good to strike back, and Will did his best to try and recapture that feeling. His body still felt ill-fitting and his hands a little numb, so he was clumsier than usual, but if he kept applying himself it would eventually get back to normal. A ball of dread rested at the pit of his stomach, but that too would melt away. He thought about throwing fireworks, about their high-pitched whines, the acrid smell of sulfur, Lucas yelling at his side. 

The door squeaked as it gaped wider. El must have sensed his mood, because her entrance was slow and light-footed. Wordlessly, she kneeled on the floor, resting her crossed arms on the edge of his bed, and watched him draw. She did this sometimes, and always gave it the serious focus she did when she was trying to understand how something worked. Will didn’t mind; she had a way of making her presence unobtrusive and even soothing. She didn’t expect anything from him and was content to simply exist alongside him. 

“Angry,” she said suddenly.

Will was alternating between his red, yellow and green pencils to draw the fireworks. He paused in his work and looked at the lines he’d made and the indentations they’d left on the paper. “Yeah, I guess so,” he said.

She looked up from the drawing. “About what?”

“I don’t know," he said with a soft snort. "Everything?”

She nodded like she understood. _Of course_ she understood. Eleven had more reasons to be angry at the world than anyone else. She’d grown up without a family—however she’d called him, Dr. Brenner didn’t deserve to be thought of as her _father_ —had found one in Hopper only to lose him a few months ago. She’d lost her powers too, and Will knew how it weighed on her. A wave of shame flooded him as he thought about how he’d almost closed his door to her. During the day, when everyone was at school or work, she was all alone while Will spent time with their friends. 

“Do you want me to draw you something?” he asked, setting aside his drawing of the Mind Flayer.

Her face lit up. “Can you draw Elorra fighting a dragon?”

“Okay,” Will said. His face muscles had felt frozen since the snow incident, but her happiness made him smile. “What sort of dragon?”

“A red one!”

A month ago, Mike and Lucas had suggested they roll new D&D characters and create some for the girls. Will was aware it was at least in part a gesture of conciliation to him, a way to wipe the slate clean after their fight, but he’d agreed with the general sentiment. They’d held a ceremony to officially welcome Max and Eleven to the Party and it had been a lot of fun. El had been delighted from beginning to end, and Max might have rolled her eyes at the proceedings a few times but Will hadn’t missed the pinkish flush of pleasure on her cheeks. By now, he’d figured out that Max hated to show it when she liked or wanted something. 

El’s character was a half-elf ranger with a pet wolf named Boo—Mike had chosen the name. Will had already made a ton of drawings for her, more than for anyone in the party, but it seemed to bring El such immense joy that he couldn’t begrudge it. Not many things could break her out of her sadness since Hopper had died—her D&D character was one thing, and Mike was another. Will missed Hopper too, but he knew his grief was nothing compared to what El or his mom must be feeling, which was why he’d tried to keep his new episodes under wraps. He didn’t want to become a burden again when everyone had so much on their plates already.

“Is she using her bow?” he asked. All the other drawings that Will made of the party’s characters stemmed from his own imagination, but El enjoyed staging the ones for her character. 

“Yes. Shooting an arrow in the dragon’s eye.”

“All right.”

Will ended up spending most of the evening drawing El’s character for her while she watched him do it. By the time he had to go to bed, he once again felt like his body belonged to him and almost slept through the night. 

—-

“So, what are we doing for Halloween? We haven’t talked about our costumes at all.”

They were in Mike’s basement, relaxing after an eventful D&D game from which the party had escaped alive only by the skin of their teeth. His friends stared at Will after he’d asked his question and he felt his face burn from their combined attention. Mrs. Wheeler had made them sugar cookies shaped like pumpkins and the last bite of his rested on his tongue, impossible to swallow.

“What?” he said. “What did I say?”

“Well, um,” Mike said. He and El were sitting so close to each other that their chairs might have been one larger chair.

“I don’t know,” Lucas said, but a quick look passed between him, Max, Dustin and Mike, and Will knew that they’d talked about it without him. 

The thought made him tense. “We always dress up for trick or treat, don’t we?” he said, maybe a little more sharply than he’d meant to. “Best night of the year, remember?” 

“Samantha Bennett is having a party at her house, maybe we can go,” Dustin suggested. “For a change of pace.”

“Yeah, no, I’m not sure we’re invited,” Max said with a grimace.

“Everyone is invited. We’re everyone.”

“I had a fight with Samantha in the girls’ bathroom. I tore her favorite dress and she said that if she ever saw me approach her house, she would ‘sic her dogs on me,’” Max said, shaping mocking quotation marks with her fingers around the last bit. “So that’s not happening.”

“Why the hell did you get into a fight with her?” Lucas asked.

“She said some stuff.” Max’s glance to him was swift, but Will didn’t miss it. “Look, it doesn’t matter. We can’t go to Samantha’s. It’s just the way it is.”

“We could try another party,” Dustin said, undeterred. “There must be tons of parties happening on Halloween night. We’re in high school now. Hey, maybe Steve could—”

_We’re not kids anymore._

“And so what,” Will said, acid burrowing a hole in his stomach, “being in high school for two months means we’re too old for trick or treat? We _have_ to go to a party because everyone else does it? Because we’re not _kids_ anymore?”

“Will, no,” Mike said, looking crestfallen, “that’s not what we—”

“This is probably the last year we can celebrate Halloween the way we used to. And El has never done it. You want to go trick or treating, don’t you, El?”

“Um.” El looked left and right at Mike and at the rest of her friends. “Yes? It always looked like fun and Hopper didn’t want me to go last year.”

“Aww, El,” Mike said and clutched her hand, immediately distracted, “why didn’t you tell me?”

“What’s there to tell?” she said with a small shrug.

“See?” Will said, feeling triumphant and sick at the same time. “We _have_ to go. For El.”

He was being a jerk, putting El on the spot like that. He had seen her face fall when the others had seemed to dismiss trick or treat, so that part wasn’t a lie, but the motives of his insistence had nothing to do with her. He wasn’t even sure _why_ he was doing it, couldn’t explain the dark contrary impulse that had forced the words out of his mouth. Because the truth was, he didn’t want to go trick or treating. Last year had been a disaster, and with the way things had been going with his faulty brain this month, he had little hope that this year would be better. The mere thought of going made him feel faintly queasy, even though he’d always loved it. But he was pretty sure that if his friends didn’t want to go, it was because they were also thinking of last year and were wondering if he could handle it. He didn’t want them to have to walk on eggshells around him. 

_Isn’t it what you’re forcing them to do by calling back to the fight you had this summer?_

“Okay, so what sort of group costumes can we do?” Dustin said. He snapped his fingers three times in quick succession. “Focus, people, we need ideas.”

“Do we _have_ to coordinate our costumes?” Max asked.

“Yes,” El said fervently. “All of us together, as a party.”

“Okay, then maybe—”

“You guys can continue without me,” Will said, pushing back his chair too forcefully. “I’m fine with whatever.”

“Where are you going?” Mike asked, sounding alarmed. He’d let go of El’s hand and was gripping the edges of his chair, like he was about to jump from his seat.

“Just to the bathroom,” Will said, trying to smile at him. 

His heart pounded hard on his way up to the first floor. Stupid, stupid, why was he so _stupid_? He wanted to punch a wall until his knuckles were raw and bloody. He’d never understood violence, but the mix of anger, anxiety and self-flagellation that boiled in his chest had him close to snapping in a messy, uncontrolled way.

“Hey, Will,” Mrs. Wheeler said when he emerged from the staircase. “Do you kids need more cookies?”

“I, uh.” He wracked his brain trying to remember how many were left, but he couldn’t remember how many he’d eaten or even what they’d tasted like. “No, we’re good, thank you.”

He rushed to the bathroom before she tried talking to him again. He closed the door and let out a long trembling breath.

“Why are you such an ass?” he murmured to himself, closing his eyes and hitting his forehead against the wall.

The resulting _boom_ was louder than he’d intended and he heard Mrs. Wheeler call, “Will? Are you all right in there?”

Will winced and bit back a curse. “Yes, I’m okay, Mrs. Wheeler! Just—just knocked my elbow against the wall.”

He sat down heavily on the toilet’s closed lid. He hated that he was still so irritated with his friends when he _knew_ that they were only trying to look out for him. They knew he couldn’t handle their usual Halloween and they’d meant to protect his pride by pretending they just didn’t feel like going trick or treating. Except that Will had blown up at them anyway, because his moods were a minefield that his friends must be tired to have to tread carefully. Who would want to keep being friends with someone like that? No one sane, that’s who. And if Max had gotten into a fight to defend him, wasn’t it super unfair to be mad at _her_?

His eyes prickled with tears and he clenched his fists, furious with himself. _And now you’ve worked yourself up to tears! Good job, Byers. Stop being a baby and pull it together._

He gave himself a moment, the time to make sure that he wasn’t going to start bawling for real, then he mopped his damp eyes with toilet paper and flushed it down. He meticulously washed his hands at the sink, even though he didn’t need it, just stalling for more time. When he finally left the bathroom, he didn’t look where he was going and almost ran into Mike.

“Are you okay?” Mike asked softly.

Will ruthlessly stomped on a fresh spark of annoyance. _We worry because we love you_ , Jonathan had told him once. _Not because we think you’re helpless._

“Yeah,” Will said. “I was just peeing.”

“Will, your eyes are red.”

Will’s hand immediately rose to rub his eyes, although it probably would only make them redder. “It’s fine, I was just—This is silly.”

“Do you really want to go trick or treating? You can tell me the truth. I won’t tell the others.”

Will glanced at his friend, saw the earnest concern on his face and sighed. He could lie to anyone else, but not to Mike. He’d long resigned himself to Mike being his weak spot. 

“No, I don’t,” he said. “But now we’ve said we’re going and El will be disappointed if we don’t. And if _I_ say I’m not going, she’ll feel bad because she’ll think that it’s only because of her that I insisted we do it, even if I didn’t want to.”

“Ah.” Mike’s eyebrows twisted the way they did when he was faced with a serious moral dilemma. As concerned as he might be for Will, disappointing El was a no go. “Maybe we could—”

“It’ll be fine, Mike,” Will said. “I just made a big scene about trick or treat so I can’t go back on that. I made my bed. At least I don’t have a monster stalker this time, so, you know. Whatever happens, it’ll be all in my head.”

“It doesn’t mean that it can’t hurt you.” Mike looked about to add something else, but his mother cut it short by appearing with a plate of cookies. 

“Here you go, boys,” she said, shoving the plate in Mike’s hands, who accepted the burden with bad grace. “I know you said you didn’t need more, Will, but I had a fresh batch ready anyway.”

“Jeez, mom, are you trying to fatten us to replace the Thanksgiving turkey?”

Mrs. Wheeler lifted an unimpressed eyebrow at her son’s tone, but Will snatched the plate from Mike’s hands and said, “Thank you so much, Mrs. Wheeler! Your cookies are delicious!” 

He gave the back of Mike’s leg a little kick, forcing him to move toward the basement’s door. Once they were both in the stairs Mike stopped suddenly, startling Will, who had to put a hand on the edge of the plate to prevent the cookies from sliding off. 

“You know I have your back, right?” Mike said. “I’ll always have your back.”

He turned around, one hand on the wooden railing and looking up at Will. In the faintly lit staircase, half of his face was shadowed, and he looked solemn and much older than usual. Will’s heart was beating in his throat and he had to swallow twice before he could answer. Their friends’ voices were an indistinct rumble in the background.

“Yeah,” he said. “‘Course I do, Mike.” 

Mike beamed at him and Will’s stomach flipped. It wasn’t anger or anxiety this time. It was something much worse, in a way, because he had no defense against it. He almost would have preferred to get angry again, except that his anger was poison and it was no help at all against unwanted feelings. Nothing about his life was ever easy, it seemed.

The others welcomed the new plate of cookies with enthusiasm and informed Will and Mike that the party had decided to go trick or treating as their D&D characters. 

“It’s gonna paint big targets on our backs,” Max said. “Major ‘nerd alert’.”

“No different from the usual,” Dustin said around the cookie he’d just jammed in his mouth.

“They don’t have to know we’re dressed as our D&D characters,” Lucas said.

“Oh, believe me, they’ll know. But whatever, it’ll be fun.”

“Why is it bad to dress up as our characters?” Will heard El ask Mike, her chin on his shoulder to better whisper in his ear.

“Oh, it’s not _bad_ , exactly, it’s just that… A lot of people think that playing D&D is silly and they’re probably going to make fun of us.”

“Nerdy,” El said.

“Yeah, nerdy, which for most people is bad, but _we_ know it’s not bad. People are stupid, that’s all.”

El looked thoughtful for a moment. “No one will make fun of my friends,” she declared.

Max laughed and reached across the table to give El’s hand a squeeze, knocking down the dragon mini that was still there from their game. “You’re right, El. You and I will protect the boys from the mean bullies.”

“We don’t need protection!” Lucas protested, looking outraged. Max laughed again and threw an arm around his neck, kissing him on the cheek.

“All right,” Dustin said, “so that’s settled. I’m gonna have to head back now, gentlemen.”

“Gentlemen?” Max said, kicking him in the ankle. “What about El and I?”

“Ow! That was totally uncalled for, Max. I was about to get to it.” Dustin stood up and made an exaggeratedly low bow in Max’s and then in El’s direction. “My ladies.”

Max gave him the finger and El giggled. Will couldn’t help but smile, his whole body relaxing as the familiar sound of his friends’ banter helped him loosen up. He felt stupid now, as he often did when he got worked up for no reason. Self-pity wasn’t a good look on anyone and he gave in to it way too often these days. Fortunately, his friends were getting excited about Halloween and no one mentioned his outburst from earlier. Lucas left soon after Dustin, but as Will was getting ready to leave with El, Max grabbed his sleeve and wriggled her finger to signal that she wanted to talk to him. Will glanced at El, but she’d started smooching with Mike to wish him a good night and neither of them were paying much attention to anything else.

“Yeah?” he said to Max.

“Can you, uh.” Max’s cheeks were pink, like always when she was embarrassed. “Can you ask your mom to make my costume for Halloween? I can pay her.”

“Sure, but why do you need my mom?”

“I’ve never had an elaborate costume for Halloween and I don’t even know how well my mom can sew. And these days I’d just rather, you know, not ask my parents for anything.”

“Yeah.” Will didn’t really _know_ , because Max wasn’t the sharing type and he wasn’t her closest friend, but he was at least peripherally aware that her home life hadn’t been improved by Billy’s death. “Okay, I’ll ask her and get back to you.”

“Thanks. And if you could not—”

“I won’t tell the others. Don’t worry.” He braced himself for what he wanted to say next. “Oh, and Max—thank you, by the way.”

She narrowed her eyes. “Thank you for what?”

“You know what.”

She held his eyes for a moment and he thought she was going to deny it, or that he’d gotten it wrong, until she flashed him a half-smile. “You’re welcome.” She punched him in the arm, hard enough that Will had to contain a wince. “Zombie Boy.”

“Careful, Zombie Boy will eat your _brain_ for dinner if you make fun of him.”

“Oh, I’m shaking in my boots. Real scary, Byers.”

They smiled at each other, then both looked back at Mike and Eleven, who were still pretty tightly entangled with one another. “You think they’re going to come back for air any time soon?” Max said, startling a chuckle out of Will.

“I think they’re trying to break a record,” he said. 

“It’s cute, but it gets annoying at times.”

Mike tore himself off from El to glare at them. “We can still hear you, you know.”

“We’re perfectly aware, thank you,” Max said with a smile that showed her teeth. 

Eventually, the lovebirds managed to separate and Will and El went back home. Biking at night was still stressful for Will but having El with him helped a lot. The Byerses couldn’t afford buying a brand-new bike, so El’s bike was secondhand. It squeaked like a murdered mouse and the chain kept skipping, but teaching her how to ride had been a great distraction during the last weeks of August. They’d all needed to take their minds off other things. 

The next few weeks were a blur. Will mostly focused on school work, trying not to think too much about Halloween and the dreaded month of November. He wasn’t very successful—even when he wasn’t consciously thinking about it, it always lurked somewhere at the back of his mind, triggering either flashbacks or anxiety spirals that sucked him in for hours. His mom had agreed to make Max’s costume and had refused to take money for it, even though Will knew that she was still trying to save so they could move out of Hawkins. He wasn’t sure how to feel about that project of hers. On the one hand, almost everything here, including his own house, was tied to a bad memory; but on the other hand, it sometimes felt like his friends were the only thing keeping him sane, despite the occasional frustration, and he hated the idea of being away from them. He hadn’t told them about he and El maybe moving and wasn’t sure how to broach the subject. They wouldn’t be happy about it; especially Mike, who would hate being separated from El again. 

On the morning of October 31, Will woke up in a cold sweat, shaking like a leaf. He was an old hand at nightmares, even before everything with the Upside Down, and had a well-established routine for when he came out of them. He let his hand roam over his duvet, getting familiar again with the way the well-worn fabric felt, and he looked around his room, cataloguing the various elements he could make out in the darkness: the shelves against the walls, the lamp under his window, the black, rectangular shapes of the posters on his walls. His dream had been about the Upside Down, that much he knew from the chill that had made goosebumps bloom all over his body, even if he didn’t remember the details. There was something else about the dream, though, something that he couldn’t put his finger on but that he knew was important. He’d heard a voice, someone calling. Calling for him?

_Help. Someone please help me!_

Will shook his head, trying to get his mind to focus on the fading memory of that voice, but the feeling was out of his grasp again and then his alarm clock started beeping shrilly, making him jump. It was time to face the day. 

Like every year, the kids at school were excited about Halloween, but they talked more about who was going to whose party and the alluring appeal of seniors’ parties than about what the best houses to hit for trick or treat were. As anticipation built up throughout the day, Will’s dread only kept growing until the knot in his stomach barely let him eat anything. It didn’t help that his mother was a ball of nerves too, probably for similar reasons. She kept repeating that everything was going to be fine, which would have driven Will up the wall even if he hadn’t already had a bad feeling about the evening.

“You’ll all stick together, right?” Mom said, picking at a loose thread on the tunic that Will wore as part of his costume—his new character was a monk, a kickass one. “You’ll stay as a group.”

“Yes, mom.”

“Good. Good. It’ll be okay if you stay together.” She walked around Will, tugging at his costume here and there to make minute adjustments. “It’ll be just fine.”

“Mom, please, you’re making me nervous. And dizzy.”

“Sorry.” She stopped, looking into his eyes, her own eyes wide and anxious. She opened her mouth, then closed it and shook her head. “I’m sorry,” she said and directed her attention to El.

Will contained a sigh. She was trying her best, he knew that. Letting him have wheels again had represented a huge concession on her part, even though having to drive him everywhere had been a big constraint on her and Jonathan and had made Will feel like a five-year old. He’d been afraid that she would go back on it after the events from this summer, but she’d either been too caught up in her grief about Hopper to think of it or had deemed it pointless in the end. But she couldn’t help being nervous about too many things and he couldn’t help being infected by her moods, which made for an explosive combination. Will didn’t like fighting with his mom but sometimes he couldn’t stop himself. 

Fortunately, she’d found another outlet in El, who needed all the attention she could get. “You look lovely,” she told El, doing the same adjusting and brushing up invisible specks of dust that she’d done with Will. El wore high boots and tight pants, a brown jacket and a long blue cloak, and looked ready to take on the world. “Are you excited about tonight, sweetie?”

“Yes,” El said, her eyes sparkling.

“You’re going to have a lot of fun,” Mom said, patting the side of El’s head, where she’d braided her hair close to her skull. El enjoyed having other people braid her hair so much that both Will and Mike had asked to be taught how to do it, but neither of them was very good at it yet. “All right. Listen, both of you—”

“If anything happens, we call you or Jonathan,” Will said before she could do it. “We know, mom.”

“Okay, sorry, I was just making sure. Have fun, you two.”

She kissed both of their heads and then made a shooing motion with her hands to tell them to go. On their way to the front door they came across a bare-chested Jonathan, who was holding three different shirts that he could wear for the party he was attending with Nancy, Steve and Robin. They shared a look and Will could read in his brother’s eyes the same lack of enthusiasm about tonight that Will himself felt—Jonathan wasn’t a partying animal, but Nancy and Steve had insisted and their combined powers of persuasion were too much for Jonathan. 

“If you need to call me,” Jonathan said, “we’re at—”

“At Steve’s house, I know. Bye, Jonathan!”

With a wave at his brother, Will darted out of the house with El in tow. His family’s routine of anxious procrastination had made them late. As they pedaled hard toward Mike’s house, where they were supposed to meet up with their friends, El asked Will, “Why was your mom so nervous? Is trick or treat dangerous?”

Will’s teeth snapped when his bike was jolted from rolling over a dead branch. “No,” he said. He tasted metal in his mouth and wondered if he’d bitten his tongue or the inside of his cheek. “It’s not dangerous. But last year I kind of had a—a Mind Flayer episode during Halloween. It almost got me that day, I freaked out… anyway. I didn’t tell Mom, but she somehow figured it out eventually.”

In a burst of speed, El was riding at his side. “It can’t get you now,” she said.

“I know. It’s just a bunch of bad memories, that’s all.”

“We’ll be there with you.”

“I know, El.” When he turned his head to smile at her, he saw that she looked troubled. “El? Is something wrong?”

It took her a second too long to return his smile. “Yes. Everything’s A-ok!” she said, repeating an expression that she’d heard in a TV show and that had captured her attention. 

At the Wheelers’ they found their friends already gathered on the sidewalk, waiting for them all dressed up. Max’s fighter costume, which Will had snuck to her at school, was form-fitting, with too many buckles and fingerless gloves. Lucas, the party’s rogue, was dressed all in black, and Dustin, their wizard, wore colorful robes and held a staff with a crystal at the top. Mike, as their new cleric, had just put on the purple cloak that he’d borrowed from Will’s old costume of Will the Wise.

“You’re late!” Lucas complained.

“Sorry,” Will said, jumping off his bike. “My mom held us up.”

“It’s fine, we’ve only been—” Mike said before he got an armful of El and was too busy kissing her to elaborate.

It still gave Will a pang to see them kiss, even though he should be long used to it. He was working on it—staying annoyed with El was a lot harder now that they’d gotten so close, and now that he’d realized how much of the punched-in-the-gut feeling he got when he watched them was rooted in his own screwed-upness.

“Let’s hit the road, guys,” Lucas said, looking at his watch.

“Yeah,” Dustin said. “If we don’t hurry then you can be sure that all the ten-year-old upstarts won’t leave us anything.”

“My god, the nerve on those kids,” Max said, rolling her eyes. 

Despite her sarcasm, Max had strong opinions about where they should go and in what order they should do it. Mike, Dustin and Lucas all pitched in with their own ideas, but Will was content to let his friends lead the way and to trail behind the group. Like a tourist visiting a foreign country, El stared at everything with wide eyes—the other kids’ costumes, the pumpkins on people’s front steps, the fake skeletons, fake ghosts, fake gravestones in the gardens. Will was trying exactly the reverse, to pretend that he was just having a walk with his friends around the neighborhood for no particular reason. Most people used the same decorations every year and the party usually walked the same streets for trick or treat. Everything looked too much like last year and Will didn’t want to get sucked in. He wasn’t going to ruin his friends’ night, especially not El’s. 

It happened so progressively that Will didn’t immediately realize that sometimes was off, but by the third house he found that he’d slipped into a numb, dreamlike state. It was very similar to what he’d experienced during the first stages of his possession by the Mind Flayer, this feeling that he hadn’t woken up properly and was stuck in that phase between sleep and consciousness. It should have alarmed him, but his mind was wrapped in cotton and his sense of alarm was muffled. It was restful to not be feeling much, way better than feeling panicked or sick or boiling mad. His friends’ chatting had a lulling effect on his mind and he drifted further and further into the numb space, letting his legs carry him around on their own. They were doing a good enough job; the rest of him didn’t need to be involved. 

He wasn’t sure how long he walked like that because time had stopped making sense, the minutes fraying like bands of mist. Therefore, it took him longer than it should have to notice that he had dragged his feet so much that he’d lost sight of the others. He looked around and wasn’t sure where he was and when he’d last seen his friends. A part of him noted that in normal circumstances this would have worried him, but he was blessedly beyond worry at the moment and figured that he should just keep walking until he found them again. Some older kids, speaking loudly like people who were a little drunk, bumped into his shoulder when they crossed paths. Will didn’t care. He caught the trail end of a sentence, “—one of those freshman nerds, the crazy one,” and he didn’t care about that either. He was floating on a nice fluffy cloud of not giving a shit about anything, at least until he saw Mike round the corner of the street, sprinting toward him.

“Will!” Mike shouted. “Will, are you okay?”

Mike skidded to a stop and doubled up, hands on his knees as he tried to catch his breath. “Thank god— _ha_ —you’re here. I turned around—you weren’t there— _ha_ —you—you—I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”

“What?” Will said, confusing seeping into his foggy mind. Mike was breathing in loud, harsh pants. How long had he run before he found Will? How far Will had lagged behind?

“Are you okay?” Mike repeated. He reached out and pawed at Will’s arms and chest, as though checking for wounds. “Are you okay? I couldn’t find you—I couldn’t—”

Mike’s breathing wasn’t calming down at all. Will’s thought process was sluggish, but it was dawning on him that Mike wasn’t just out of breath after a run. He was having a full-blown panic attack. 

“What’s wrong— _ha_ —what’s wrong with me?” Mike said, his forehead creasing. “Shit. I can’t—catch my breath. _Shit_.”

Suddenly, everything rushed back to Will—feelings, physical sensations, sounds and sights. Everything was stark, bright and loud, soaked with adrenaline, his pulse thrumming in his fingertips. Will ignored it all, because the only thing that mattered was that Mike was having a meltdown in front of him.

“Mike,” he said, gripping his friend’s shoulders. “Hey, look at me.”

“What’s happening to me?” Mike asked, his breathing quickening even more and his eyes frantically shifting left and right, like he couldn’t fix them on anything.

“I think you’re having a panic attack, but it’s okay. It’s gonna be okay.”

“Hey, what’s wrong with him?” someone behind Will asked, a girl’s voice.

“I’ve got him, it’s fine,” Will said tightly, all his attention on Mike, whose shoulders felt rock hard under his hands. “Thank you, we don’t need any help.”

“Is he having an asthma attack? Because I have—"

“I said it’s _fine_ ,” Will snapped. “Leave us alone!”

“All right! Jesus!”

There were too many people around and Will knew that being stared at would only make it worse for Mike, so he dragged his friend into the garden of the closest house, between a low wall and a bush of hydrangeas. Mike let himself be pulled, uncharacteristically docile, not protesting when Will sat him down in the damp grass but still whistling like a kettle. 

“Here. No one can see us now,” Will said. He kneeled down in front of his friend, grabbing his wrists to get his attention. “Look at me, Mike. Look at me.”

Mike looked up, his chest heaving and his eyes wide with incomprehension. “What—”

Will waited until they’d locked eyes before he said, “You have to get your breathing under control. Just do what I say, okay? When I take a breath, you do it with me. Just breathe with me. Okay?”

“O-okay.”

“Now, you breathe in.” Will took a long, drawn-out breath, gesturing with his hand so Mike would do it with him. After much gesturing, Mike imitated him, his breathing hitching as though he were crying. 

“Good, that’s great. Now you breathe out. Come on, you can do it.”

It took a while, because Mike became frustrated too quickly, his hands grasping restlessly for Will’s arms and his breathing getting out of whack again. So they had to start over, Will patiently repeating his instructions and making a show of breathing in, breathing out. Part of him was amazed at himself for being so calm and confident, but he couldn’t give it much thought as long as Mike was still panicking. Once Mike was breathing normally again, Will sat next to him and they both leaned their backs against the brick wall, boneless and worn-out.

“That was… super scary,” Mike said, wrapping himself in his purple cloak.

“Yeah,” Will said. “It is.”

Mike’s head rolled against the wall as he turned his head toward Will. “I didn’t know it sucked so much.”

“It’s fine, Mike. Are you feeling okay, now?”

“Yeah.” Mike closed his eyes and dragged his hands down his face. “Yeah, I’m fine.”

“What happened?”

“I don’t know. I turned around and you weren’t there, and I just… freaked out. I was convinced that something had happened to you. Total panic, I couldn’t even _think_.” He opened his eyes and straightened up, looking at Will with renewed alarm. “It’s not because I think you’re helpless or anything! I wasn’t thinking straight. It was weird.”

Will thought about his mom and her anxiety, about his brother, who checked on him a few times a day at school. It always annoyed him so much, because it made him feel like the useless burden he was afraid he was, someone the others had to constantly worry about because he couldn’t be trusted not to get himself kidnapped, or possessed, or to freak out at the slightest provocation. He hated it because it made him feel _fragile_. But to witness Mike having an honest-to-god panic attack because the fear that something would happen to Will again was too overwhelming, now that was… Well, it was embarrassing, for one, and it stirred some thoughts that Will tried to avoid, but it also forced him to see things from another perspective. How would _he_ have felt if his mother or brother, or if one of his friends had gone missing, if he had to watch them go through everything Will had gone through only a year later without being able to do much to help? It had been awful on Will’s side of things, but it must not have been pleasant on the other side either. For the first time, maybe, he considered the idea that his trip to the Upside Down and his possession by the Mind Flayer were things that had not only happened to him, but to everyone who cared about him too.

“I’m sorry,” he murmured.

“Hey, no,” Mike said, gripping his shoulder. “It’s not your fault. It’s me, I don’t know, my brain got scrambled.”

It was eerie to Will how much Mike sounded like himself right now. “Not your fault either.”

“Thank god you were there, by the way, because I don’t know what I would have done. I didn’t understand what was happening. But are _you_ okay? I mean, why were you so far behind?”

“I was… I don’t know how to explain it.”

“Did you have a flashback?”

“No,” Will said. Now that he wasn’t distracted by taking care of Mike, he felt shaky, like he was coming out of a nightmare. “I felt… You know that feeling when you had to wake up too early, or went to bed too late, and in the morning you feel like you haven’t woken up for real? You know you’re awake, but everything around you doesn’t feel quite real. See what I mean?”

“Yeah.”

“I was feeling like that. Like nothing could really touch me.”

“That sounds pretty nice, actually.”

“Yeah, but—” It _had_ felt pretty nice, but to think back on that weird numb state now that he'd snapped out of it made Will uneasy. “I lost track of you guys and of where I was, so I don’t think it’s a very good thing. Next time I’ll be, I don’t know, more wary of it.”

Mike snorted a laugh. “Well, look at us. Crazy together, right?”

“Yeah,” Will said, laughing too at the reminder. “I guess it’s not too bad if we’re in it together.”

“No, it’s not.” 

Something had shifted in Mike’s tone—it had become lower, deeper. His hand was still on Will’s shoulder, his fingers curled around it. Will was acutely aware of the points of contact of each of Mike’s five fingers, as well as of his breathing, now soft and steady, of the pattern of freckles on his nose and cheeks, of the waves in his floppy brown hair. Mike was watching him just as intently, watching as though he were looking for the answer to a particularly thorny problem on Will’s face. Will felt frozen; not in fear, like when the Mind Flayer was close, but like he and Mike had been hit by a spell and one wrong move on his part would break it. 

“You cold?” Mike asked in that strange low-pitched voice that sent a tingle up Will’s spine. 

“What?” Will looked down at his hands and saw that they were trembling slightly. “A little, I guess.”

“I could—"

“What are you boys doing here?”

Will and Mike both jumped at the angry voice, their knees knocking against each other. An older woman wrapped in a pink fluffy bathrobe and wearing pink slippers was watching them from under the house’s porch. 

“We’re, uh,” Mike said. 

“We were hiding from bullies, ma’am,” Will said. “We’re sorry.”

The woman’s irritated expression softened a little. “I don’t see anyone right now,” she said gruffly. “You should go before they come back.”

“Yeah, of course. Come on, Mike.” Will scrambled to his feet, pulling Mike up with him. “Sorry again!”

“Yeah, we’re sorry!” Mike said. 

They broke into a run until the end of the street, narrowly avoiding a collision with a young woman who held by the hand two identical little boys dressed up as tiny vampires. When they stopped running, they looked at each other and burst out laughing.

“Well, that was inspired,” Mike said. 

“It’s happened so often in the past that it was barely a lie,” Will said. 

As their laughter subsided, a strange awkwardness took its place. Will wanted to say something to lighten the mood again, but he wasn’t sure what, because he wasn’t sure of what was happening. The only time in his life he could remember things getting awkward with Mike was when they’d had their fight this summer, but nothing of the kind had happened today. Was Mike embarrassed about his panic attack? Will opened his mouth to comfort him but then decided against it—from his own experience, he knew how easily he could make Mike feel worse by trying to make him feel better. 

Mike looked away first, his cheeks flaming red. “We should find the others. They’re going to wonder where we are.”

“Yeah, you’re right.”

It was selfish of him, but for a moment Will wished they wouldn’t find the rest of their friends too quickly.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The fic starts very Will-centric because I was frustrated by how little Will had to do in season 3, but it will open up in future chapters and you will get different perspectives.


	2. Chapter 2

Eleven had been a little worried that people would slam the door to their faces when they showed up asking for candies, even though her friends had assured her that they wouldn’t. And indeed, they’d been right. It was like some kind of magic trick: they would knock on a door, yell ‘trick or treat’ and people would just hand over candy that they kept in a bowl, smiling, telling them how cute they looked and sometimes commenting on their costumes. That last part sometimes missed the mark—‘ _I’m not a magician!’_ Dustin kept complaining. _‘I’m a wizard! A_ wizard! _That’s not the same thing at all._ ’

“What does ‘trick or treat’ mean, exactly?” El asked Max. She’d thought until now that it was just the name of the activity and hadn’t realized that they were supposed to say it to get candy. 

“Well, it means—” Max paused so she could push the lollipop she had in her mouth against her left cheek. Lucas, Dustin and Mike were adamant that you shouldn’t touch your ‘haul’ until you were done, but Max had retorted that it was a stupid rule. “It means that if people don’t give us candy, we can do stuff to them in retaliation—like egg their house, for example.”

“But isn’t that… mean? What if they don’t have candy?”

Max tilted her head in surprise. “It’s _Halloween_. Of course they have candy. If they don’t, they generally don’t decorate their house or they pretend they’re not here by turning off their lights. It’s just a stupid phrase we say as a tradition. We don’t really do it.”

“Oh, okay.”

The atmosphere in the streets was exciting. All the people with costumes, the very small children holding their parents’ hands, the laughter and the excited cries—it gave off an impression of _happy_ that Eleven felt deep in her chest, swelling like a balloon. The decorations in the gardens were supposed to be scary, but she’d seen real _scary_ and mostly found them funny. The pumpkins looked friendly with their broad toothy smiles and their warm orange glows. Joyce had given her and Will a pumpkin each so they could carve it, but even with Will’s help Eleven’s pumpkin looked sad and misshapen, whereas Will’s looked amazing. He’d offered to switch with her and give her his own pumpkin, but she hadn’t wanted him to end up with an ugly pumpkin just because she was clumsy. When she’d told Mike that story, he’d kissed her and said that she was the best, which had made her feel even more okay with her decision.

Speaking of Mike, he’d let go of her hand a while ago and Eleven couldn’t see him anymore, as she and Max had walked ahead of the others. She turned around and caught sight of Lucas and Dustin a few feet behind them, their heads together and their postures tense, looking like they were arguing in low voices.

“What’s going on?” Eleven asked. “Where are Mike and Will?”

“Oh, hell,” Max said. 

She marched toward Lucas and Dustin and Eleven followed her. The boys stopped talking when they saw them coming, but they both looked unhappy. 

“What’s the matter?” Max asked them.

They shared a look and then Lucas sighed. “We lost track of Will. Mike noticed it first and went back to find him.”

“We were arguing about whether we should go too,” Dustin said. “For the record, _I_ think we should go. What if Will is in trouble?”

“We weren’t _arguing_ —” Lucas said.

“You two were totally arguing,” Max said.

“Okay, maybe we were, but I just think that if Will is somewhere having a panic attack or a flashback or something, we should let Mike handle it. Will is _not_ going to like having all of us hover around him if he’s not well. You know how he feels about it.”

“Yeah, but what if this isn’t what’s happening? What if it’s something else and he could use all the help he can get?”

Max butted in, siding with Lucas, and the discussion only got more heated from there. Eleven didn’t say anything, kept from talking by the cold feeling that was growing in her chest, a weighty ball of guilt that strained her lungs. She had known that Joyce was nervous about tonight, and that Will was nervous too despite his efforts to pretend the contrary. Earlier, she’d meant to reassure him but her words had been empty—not exactly a lie, but when she’d said ‘ _It can’t get to you_ ,’ she’d had no way of making it true for sure.

Every morning, she tried using her powers again. Will was the only one who knew about it and this was simply because he’d caught her doing it. She hadn’t even mentioned it to Mike. _Everyone_ —Mike, her friends, Joyce and Jonathan—told her that she was probably better off without her powers, that now she could put everything related to Hawkins National Laboratory in the past. Joyce had said, sweetly, worriedly, that Eleven didn’t need her powers to be special and worthy of love, and Eleven’s eyes had prickled with tears at hearing it. What neither Joyce nor the others understood, was that without her powers Eleven felt like she was half-blind, limping, unbalanced. And the worst part was that it didn’t feel like they were completely gone, but rather like they were simmering at the back of her mind, just out of her reach. At night, she sometimes woke up and lay in the dark, thinking: what if something bad happened again? What if the Upside Down opened up one more time or another monster came? She would be utterly _powerless_ to do anything to help her friends. She’d tasted powerless already and she didn’t care for it. She’d lost her powers and Billy had died, which had made Max cry. She’d lost her powers and _Hopper_ had died. 

_Help._

The voice was faint and static-y, like coming from a badly tuned radio, but it made Eleven’s heart beat faster all the same.

_Help me._

She startled. This had sounded like Hopper. She’d thought she’d heard his voice before, but it had always seemed like she was imagining things, like her desire to see him again was playing tricks on her. She looked around and saw a group of older teenagers dancing on a lawn around a radio. The music was so loud it vibrated in Eleven’s bones but still she stepped closer, trying to catch again the voice that had faded in and out.

 _Help, please—_ scrsshh _—help—Eleven!_

“Hop?” Eleven whispered, feeling her eyes well up. 

“El?” A hand dropped on her shoulder and Eleven jumped, but this was only Max. “Are you okay?” 

“Ye-yeah. I just thought—”

“Look over there. Our wayward boys are back.”

Mike and Will were walking up the street in their direction, both looking whole and okay. Relief flooded Eleven and she ran up to them, only stopping when Mike caught her by the shoulders.

“Are you okay?” she asked, cupping the side of his face with her hand.

“Yeah,” he said. He looked tired, his eyes shadowed, and Eleven thought he might be telling her one of those lies that weren’t really lies, just things you said so other people wouldn’t be upset.

“Will?” she asked, shooting Will a look over Mike’s shoulder. 

“I’m all right,” he said, smiling at her, but he looked tired too. Maybe Lucas was right, maybe he’d had an episode, and Eleven felt awful that she hadn’t been able to help him.

The sound of stomping feet came from behind her back. “Are you guys all right?” Max asked.

“Yeah, we’re fine,” Mike said.

“Will? You okay, buddy?” Dustin asked.

“Uh, yeah,” Will said. “Sorry I made you guys worry.”

“Do you want to go home or—”

“No, no, we barely started. I’m sorry, I—”

“Will just got distracted,” Mike cut in. “It’s my fault if we were gone so long. I, uh, I had a panic attack.”

That declaration stunned everyone in the group and they stared at Mike for a few seconds, which made him squirm and look away, his mouth pursing in embarrassment. El still had a hand against his cheek and could feel his jaw working under her palm.

“ _You_ got a panic attack?” Max said.

“Yeah, and so what?” Mike retorted defensively. 

“Well, what happened?” Lucas asked. 

“I just—” Mike looked over at Will and something passed between them that Eleven didn’t understand. “When I couldn’t see Will, I freaked out. I know it’s stupid.”

“It’s not stupid,” Lucas said, patting Mike on the shoulder.

“With everything that’s happened, we all get a little jumpy from time to time,” Dustin said.

“Let’s just continue,” Mike said. He circled Eleven’s wrist with his fingers and gently pulled her hand away from his face. “If we waste more time, all the candy will go to the ten-year-old kids. And we don’t want that.”

He threaded his fingers with Eleven’s, and the weight of his palm against hers relieved some of the worry that still nagged her. She turned and gave Will a smile, stretching out her other hand.

Will looked at her hand, then at Mike. “Uh, isn’t it weird if I—”

“Who decides what’s weird, anyway?” Mike said. “El wants to hold your hand. Just go ahead, man.”

As they got ready to start their trick or treat tour again, Eleven cast a last look over at the radio she’d heard Hopper’s voice from. The sound of the music that played on it drifted over to her, clear enough even though they were standing further away from it, but she couldn’t hear anything like the call for help she’d caught earlier. Had she just imagined it again? Mike was tugging on her hand, so she pushed the thought at the back of her mind for later examination. She had a lot more candy to gather. 

—-

El was kneeling on the floor, her hand outstretched in front of her with her fingers splayed, entirely focused on the stuffed bear that Hopper had given her and which was currently slouched on her bed. _Move_ , she ordered it. _Move!_

Pressure built behind her forehead, right between her eyes. Her ears roared and blood pounded in her temple, her arm aching from how much she strained her muscles, trying with all her might to make _something_ happen. With a cry of frustration, she dropped her arm. Her teddy bear almost seemed to be mocking her, his normally kind eyes glinting maliciously, so she grabbed him and shoved him under the duvet. That would teach him.

“Still no luck?”

Will was standing in the doorway. Eleven always left her door open, even at night, because she hated closed doors and knew that none of the Byerses would come in if she wanted to be left alone. From the way Will hovered on her doorstep, Eleven could tell that he was waiting for her permission to enter, so she stood up, sat on her bed and patted the spot next to her. Will smiled and came to sit by her side. 

“I know I can do it,” Eleven said. “They’re not _gone_. I don’t understand what’s wrong.”

Will looped an arm around her shoulders and Eleven leaned against him, tucking her head under his chin. In this position, she could feel the steady thrum of his heartbeat and it was relaxing. 

“Maybe you just need some time,” he said.

“It’s been _months_!” she exclaimed, burrowing her face against his chest to stifle the furious screams that wanted to escape. “How long is ‘some time’? What if—what if I broke something, up there?” She pointed a finger at her forehead.

“You’re not _broken_ ,” Will said, a breath stuttering in his chest. He clung harder to her shoulder. “What have you tried so far? Just to move things?”

Eleven nodded, his comment making her think. She’d only tried to use her power to move things with her mind—Dustin, who knew these things, had called it _telekinesis_ —because it had always been the most reliable of her powers and she’d figured that if she could do this one thing, the rest would just follow on its own. What if she’d tackled the problem from the wrong end? 

“There was…” Eleven lifted her head off Will’s chest and pushed herself in a sitting position. “On Halloween, I heard something.”

“What do you mean?”

“People were listening to a radio on a lawn and I heard… It sounded like someone calling for me. It sounded like _Hopper_.”

She expected him to say that she must have imagined it but instead he frowned thoughtfully, rubbing his color-stained hands together. 

“I’ve had—” he started slowly, like he was remembering something at the same time he was telling her about it. “—a nightmare. About the Upside Down. I mean, I have a lot of nightmares about the Upside Down, but in this one… I heard someone call for help.”

“Hopper?” Eleven asked, her throat tight from hope.

Will shrugged with one shoulder, then the other, like a shiver had rippled through him. “I don’t know. Maybe it was just a nightmare. I don’t know for sure. I’m sorry.”

“True sight,” Eleven said.

“No, El, that’s an idea that Mike had but ‘true sight’ isn’t a real thing, just a D&D concept. What happened to me then was the Mind Flayer preying on me, that’s all. I could see some stuff because he already had his hooks into me.”

“But you could feel him this summer.”

“I guess it was just…” He shrugged again, but from the nervous drumming of his fingers she could tell that the topic was upsetting him. “Like a scar, you know? People who have old wounds can sometimes feel when the weather is turning bad. That’s what it was. I’m not like you; I don’t have any powers. I’m more like a lamer barometer. But that doesn’t mean that what you heard was wrong. Maybe you should try and see if you can find his signal again.”

Eleven looked at the walkie-talkie on the floor next to her bed, which she used to talk to Mike and her other friends. She’d found Will with that sort of device, two years ago, when he had been trapped in the Upside Down. At the time, all she’d known about him was how desperately Mike wanted to find him. 

“You’re right,” she said, picking up the walkie. “I have to try.”

“Do you want me to go?” 

“No, stay.”

She spent a while fiddling with the knobs, trying to find the correct channel. She didn’t know which one it was in advance and could only feel for it with her mind, the way you would find your way in the dark using your hands. It had been like that when she’d looked for Will, at least. Eventually, Will’s faint, scratchy voice had come out of the walkie, singing a song that had been completely foreign to Eleven at the time but that had made Mike jump out of the couch he’d been slouched in, vibrant with new hope. 

Nothing of the kind happened here. Eleven tried and tried until her head felt stuffy and aching, but she couldn’t hear Hopper again. Maybe there had never been anything to hear—or maybe Hopper had _died_ since then, trapped and cold and alone, Eleven too weak and stupid to get him out in time. 

“I should—” she said and stopped, her voice catching. “I should try something else. I should try to find him in the dark place.”

“El, are you sure that you—”

She didn’t want to argue with Will about it, so she ignored him and just went to her drawers to get something she could use as a blindfold. Mike might have pushed the issue, but Will just sighed and turned on the radio that had belonged to Jonathan, tuning it to static. Eleven sat cross-legged on the floor, tying the scarf she’d pulled from her drawer around her head. Will wasn’t making any sounds at all, even breathing sounds, and it was easy to focus on the static, to let them wash her mind clean of everything else. She slowed her breaths until they were deep, deep, expanding her lungs and her ribs. The afterimage of her room lingered in bright bursts of light for a moment and then fizzled out. She was anchored in her body, but also wide open and ready to step into the dark place.

Normally, this was the point where she should have been sucked in and found herself _there_ , walking on black water and surrounded by thick, opaque darkness. But the only darkness she found now was the one she saw behind her closed eyelids. She could still feel the carpet of her room under her butt. She wasn’t going anywhere.

She wrenched the scarf off her head, her eyes burning. Will hadn’t moved from his spot on the bed and he gave her a sympathetic look.

“You’ll try again later,” he said.

She knew he was just trying to be nice, but she’d long run out of patience for _later_.

She told Mike about it when when he came to visit her in the afternoon—her and Will, but Will had declared he wanted to give them some alone time. Eleven and Mike had talked a little about Will, after he’d gone to his room. No one had missed how quiet and withdrawn he’d become, as well as jumpy, prone to spacing out and obviously sleeping very little. But he aggressively pretended that nothing was wrong and hated it when people tried to contradict him. 

“It’s just some bad memories,” he would say to Eleven, as though she didn’t know how much bad memories could hurt.

When they’d exhausted the topic of Will, reaching a point where talking about it turned into them feeding each other’s anxiety, Eleven told Mike about hearing Hopper on Halloween and her attempts at finding him again. Mike went _hmm_ in all the right places, but he looked distracted, like something else was on his mind. 

“Mike,” she said, poking him in the ribs. “Are you listening?”

“Wha—yes! Aaahh, don’t do that, you know I’m ticklish. You were saying you couldn’t get into the dark place.”

“Yes.”

He was looking at her now, attentive, waiting for her to say more, but she could tell something was off. It wasn’t the first time she’d noticed it, too. She still had some trouble with social situations, failing to pick up cues that seemed obvious to everyone else, but she’d learned how to read the few people in her life and she was best at reading Mike. Lately, she’d found that he sometimes looked like his mind drifted when he was with her—not like he was bored, but like he was drawn to a faraway place, somewhere that caused him hurt.

“What’s wrong?” she asked.

“What? Why do you think anything is wrong?” He laughed nervously, which only increased her feeling that he was hiding something. “Nothing’s wrong, I mean, nothing unusual, it’s just a tough period of the year for everyone and I—”

“Mike,” she said warningly. “No lies.”

He faltered under her gaze, and when he opened his mouth she thought that he was going to tell her what the matter was. “I’m okay, El. I’m just worried about Will.”

She narrowed her eyes. _This_ wasn’t a lie, but it wasn’t the whole truth either. “Not just that,” she said.

“I—” He took her hands, arranged the fingers over his palms, then looked up at her. “I—I can’t. Please, stop asking.” His voice had gone soft, pleading. “Please, _please._ ”

Mike looked like he was about to cry and it deeply unsettled Eleven. “Okay,” she said.

“Thank you.” He rubbed his nose and pressed a thumb between his eyes. “And I _was_ listening to you. Here’s what I think: you should ask Dustin to borrow Cerbero for a stronger signal. Like we did for Will when we used the radio at the AV club, remember?”

“Yes.”

“If Hopper is hiding somewhere in the Upside Down, then you need something stronger than our shitty walkie talkies to reach him. But, El.” He tightened the hold he had on both of her hands, and at the gentler quality of his voice she knew what he was about to say. “Even if Hopper really escaped the explosion by hiding in the Upside Down, it’s been months. Will was there for a week and he was in a really bad shape when they found him. Hopper had to resuscitate him.”

Eleven pulled her hands out of his grip. “It’s _Hopper_. Will was—” She didn’t want to make it sound like she thought Will was weak, because she knew he wasn’t, so she struggled to find the right way to express what she meant. “Will was just a boy.”

“Maybe you’re right,” he said, but it didn’t sound like he really believed it. 

The next few days were difficult. The weather turned awful, with sheets of rain pouring over the town like someone had turned a faucet in the sky wide open, so climbing up the hill to use Cerbero was out of the question. Eleven still tried to tune in to Hopper with her walkie talkie or to go to the dark place, but neither option gave any result. Will walked through the days like a ghost, only talking if directly addressed, and Mike was still oddly distant and preoccupied. Both things were hard for Eleven to take, but at least with Will she knew what the problem was. Given the way Mike had reacted when she’d asked him what was wrong, she was hesitant about bringing it up again. 

Max had helped her before with boy problems, so Eleven figured she could help again. Even though Max had only ever had one boyfriend, same as Eleven, it felt like she was so much more knowledgeable about these things. When Max invited her for some ‘no boys time’ one afternoon while her parents were away, Eleven thought it was the right moment to share her worries.

They were both on Max’s bed, lying on their stomach and reading comic books. Eleven was reading _Wonder Woman_ #271 and Max was reading _The Thing_ #27, but they frequently commented the action to each other and Max helped Eleven with the bigger words she had trouble with. But Eleven had actually stopped reading a while ago, her mind going from Hopper to Will to Mike and the worries she felt for each of them. She had to be able to help at least _one_ of them.

“Mike is acting weird,” she blurted out.

Max looked away from her comics, raising an eyebrow. “What was that?”

“Mike. Something’s wrong, but I don’t know what.”

“Well, his _face_ is wrong, for starters.”

“ _Max_.”

Max sighed. “Okay.” She closed her comics and pushed herself up, turning toward Eleven and crossing her legs. “All right. Tell me what makes you think something is wrong.”

“He’s… I don’t know. Thinking about something that bothers him. Distant.”

“He worries about Will. Lucas does too. I mean, we all do.”

“Yes, but there’s something else. More.”

“Did you ask him about it?”

“Yes, but he got really upset, like he was going to cry, and said to please stop asking.”

Max’s brow furrowed as she absent-mindedly played with the tip of her hair, weaving strands of it around her fingers. “What if—no, I don’t think so.”

“What? What are you thinking?”

Max tugged on her hair and gave Eleven a look that she interpreted as reluctant. Max was rarely reluctant about anything and that look filled Eleven with dread. “When a guy looks like he’s hiding something, most of the time he’s cheating. That’s what I’ve heard, at least.”

“Cheating?” At first Eleven thought about cheating in a game, which made no sense, but then she remembered hearing the word in another context on TV and asking Joyce about it. Her stomach sunk. “With… another girl? Who?”

“I just said I don’t think so,” Max said, waving her hands. “I shouldn’t have mentioned it. It just seems like an obvious possibility, but I’m with Mike at school all the time and outside of it, when _you_ ’re not with him, and I don’t know where he would have found the time to meet another girl and start fooling around with her.”

“Okay,” Eleven said, but Max’s comment had opened another pit in her stomach. She hadn’t thought of that but now couldn’t keep her mind off it. What if Mike didn’t want to be with her anymore? What if he’d found someone he liked better?

“You could always dump his ass again,” Max said. Her tone was light and her mouth was smiling, but Eleven couldn’t tell whether she was joking or not. 

“No, I don’t think it’s a good idea. I don’t _want_ to.”

“Do you want me to ask Lucas about it?”

“No,” Eleven said, shaking her head forcefully. If Lucas knew something that Mike wanted to keep secret, he wouldn’t share it with anyone. Friends didn’t tell on each other.

“Then you’ll have to ask him again and make him tell you. Don’t let him use his puppy eyes on you!”

“Puppy eyes?” Eleven repeated.

“Yeah, you know, the wet, sad eyes.” Max shifted her feet to tuck them under her, dropping her hands on her lap. She widened her eyes and jutted her lower lip to a comical effect. “Like a puppy.”

Eleven brought a hand to her mouth, stifling a giggle. “He doesn’t do that!”

“He _so_ does.”

Max did the wide-eyed look again, then her eyes met Eleven’s and the two of them cracked up, dissolving into laughter, two giggling heaps on the bed. They laughed until their ribs ached and their eyes leaked tears.

—-

Max would never admit it to Lucas in a million years, but the reason she enjoyed her History class so much was because she thought that Mr. Cooper was kind of cute for an old guy. It was his voice, mostly. She could have listened to that voice talk about the American Revolution all day long and asked for extra time after school—actually, this would have had the added benefit of delaying her going back home, which she tried to do as much as possible these days. The atmosphere at home was morose at best and explosive at worst. Her stepfather had never raised a hand on her, but she’d seen him lay into Billy often enough that her greatest fear was that now his son was gone, he would start missing his usual target and turn on her. So she tried her best to be out of sight, out of mind.

Max shook her head. This wasn’t the moment to get all mopey about it. She was at school right now, and she was listening to Mr. Cooper’s deep rumbling voice telling her—well, telling the class—about people who’d died two hundred years ago. At lunch break she would meet with her friends and listen to them bicker about science stuff, look at Will’s new drawings, and fight with Mike about music. By the way, speak of the devil—

“Mr. Wheeler, are you listening?” Mr. Cooper asked, sounding annoyed.

Mike flinched, obviously wrenched out of whatever daydream he’d been lost in. “Uh, yeah, I was—”

“Is there anything more worthy of your attention than my class?”

“No, of course not. History is, like, my favorite subject and—"

“Then can you answer my question?”

“What—” Mike’s fingers nervously rolled his pencil over the blank page of his notepad. “What was the question again?”

Jesus, how much deeper was Mike going to dig himself? There were days where Max might have gotten a kick out of watching him be taken down a peg or two, depending on when their last serious fight had happened, but he looked downright pitiable and she wasn’t _that_ cruel. On her own notepad, Max scribbled: _‘European country ally to US??’_ She extended her leg across the gap between her desk and Mike’s to nudge his foot with hers.

He glanced swiftly at the page, frowned a little and then looked back at their teacher. “Oh, no, I remember. It was France, sir. France was allied to the US during the Revolutionary War.”

Mr. Cooper sighed, shooting Max a look that told her that her intervention hadn’t gone unnoticed. Max felt herself redden, but fortunately Mr. Cooper decided to let it go and picked up his lecture where he’d left off. Mike gave Max a nod of thanks and then went back to staring down at his hands. Max was distracted for the rest of the period by wondering what was up with him. He was best at science, but he was a good student and he listened in class. This, combined with the miserable look on his face and El telling Max that he’d been behaving strangely, told Max that something was seriously off.

When the bell rang, Mike bolted from his seat and dashed to the door instead of waiting for her as he usually would. Max gave herself a second to decide on a course of action. She could just leave him be and wait for him to confide himself in someone else, El or Will, or Lucas or Dustin. Any of their friends would be a better option than Max. She would quite literally jump into a monster’s path for him, but on an ordinary day they butted heads more often than not. Then again, maybe this was precisely why she should be the one to find out what was wrong with him—she wasn’t afraid to be brutal to get an answer out of him. 

Decision made, Max shoved her stuff in her backpack and trotted up after him. Weaving her way through the flow of students, she managed to catch up with him and grabbed his shoulder.

“Hey, wait up!”

“Jesus, Max!” he yelled. “Give me a heart attack, will you!”

“What’s wrong with you?” she asked, figuring that there was no need to beat around the bush. 

If he’d reacted with confusion to her question, she might have let it slide, but instead he looked away, chewing on his bottom lip. “Nothing,” he said.

“You’re such a shitty liar.”

“Leave me the fuck alone,” he hissed, trying to shrug off her hand. 

Max dug her fingers in. “Not until you tell me what the matter is, dipshit. El said that—”

She’d meant to get a reaction out of him by mentioning El, but she had _not_ expected it to be so extreme: he whirled around and almost shouted to her face, clutching her shoulders, “El talked to you? What did she say? What did she _say_?”

“Hey, calm down and let go of me! I’ll—”

She had to swallow back the rest of her sentence because Mike grabbed her hand and yanked her arm, hard enough that her teeth clicked. Ignoring her protests he pulled her along, opened a door and pushed her inside.

“Mike, this is the _boys_ ’ bathroom! If anyone sees us, they’ll think—”

Mike cursed under his breath and opened a stall, dragging Max inside with him. The door slammed close behind them and for a moment they were just breathing hard, clutching each other in the narrow space.

“Oh, yeah,” Max said, not whispering but trying not to speak too loudly either. “This is _so_ much better.”

“What did El tell you?” Mike asked in a strained voice.

“You know, I don’t have to share with you things that she—”

“Max, _please_.”

Max heaved a sigh. _Damn_ his pleading eyes. “She didn’t tell me much,” she admitted. “Just that you were acting weird and that she was worried about you. That’s all.”

Mike’s hands dropped from her shoulders and he buried his face in them, muttering, ‘ _oh god, oh god, oh god’_ under his breath.

“What’s going on, Mike? Come on, you gotta give me something. Mike.” She took hold of his wrists and tried to tug his hands down. “You’re such a pain in the ass. Mike!”

He stopped resisting her so suddenly that she almost lost her balance and toppled over him. She was about to gripe about it when she saw that his eyes were red and wet. “What is it?” she asked uneasily. 

“Something weird is happening to me,” he said in a miserable whisper. “It’s—it’s about Will.”

The words ‘something weird’ and ‘Will’ in the same sentence turned Max’s blood to ice, but as she was about to ask him to elaborate, she heard the door to the bathroom open and someone walk in. She froze up, hoping that the newcomer wouldn’t noticed two pairs of feet in the space between the door of their stall and the floor. She held her breath, Mike’s wrists clasped in her hands, and listened to the sounds of the unknown boy peeing in one of the urinals and then leaving the bathroom—and not washing his hands, ew. Mike looked down at his feet the whole time, his hair falling into his eyes, looking like a child waiting for his punishment.

“What do you mean, ‘something weird’?” Max asked in a strangled voice once she was sure that no one else was in the bathroom. “Is it, like, the Mind Flayer again or—”

“No, no, nothing like that.”

“What _is_ it, then?”

“Promise me you won’t tell anyone about it. Not El, not Lucas, not _anyone_.”

“I swear to god, if you don’t start talking, I’m gonna—”

“ _Promise_.”

“Okay, okay, I swear I won’t reveal your big secret to anyone. Cross my heart and everything. Now, come on, the suspense is killing me.”

“It’s—” Mike took a deep breath, like he was about to take a jump off a cliff—something that Lucas and Dustin said he’d actually done once, the crazy asshole. “You remember on Halloween, when I said that I had a panic attack?”

“Yeah, how could I forget? It was only my second Halloween with you guys, but it seems like it can never be drama-free. But—do you mean that it wasn’t true?”

“No, that was true. I totally flipped out.” Max had let go of his wrists and he started fingering the string of his hoodie. “Anyway. Will helped me calm down and then we just took a moment to rest and… I got—a weird feeling.”

He glanced up at Max, as though checking whether she was getting what he was implying. Max wasn’t getting anything, though, and it was making her impatient. “Spit it out, Mike. What sort of weird feeling?”

“Like… something you’re not supposed to feel for your friend. For your _guy_ friend. I wanted so _badly_ to—to put my arms around him and just, like, hold him close, and, um—” Mike let his sentence die there, his face so red he looked really badly sunburned.

“Yeah, that’s—that’s something,” Max said faintly, reeling from the shock. She was then struck by a horrifying thought. “But what about El? What does it mean for El? You asshole, tell me you’re not using her to cover for—”

“No!” Mike shouted, so loudly that it made both of them jump. 

Max shoved a hand against his mouth and shushed him furiously. “Keep it down! Someone’s gonna hear us.” 

His pushed his tongue out of his mouth and against her palm until she took her hand off and wiped it on her pants, disgusted.

“No,” he repeated more quietly. “I’m not using El. I love her. I love her _so_ much.”

“Are you sure about—that thing you felt? Wasn’t it, like, the adrenaline or something? If it was just _one_ moment—”

“But it wasn’t just one moment,” Mike said, his voice low and a little hoarse. His initial admission seemed to have loosened his tongue because he continued, speaking faster as he went on, “Since everything that’s happened, I’ve felt pretty protective of him but I just thought, you know, he’s one of my best friends and he’s been through some horrible shit so I figured it was only normal that I would feel that way. But the more time goes on and the more it feels _different_ , not like the way I feel about Lucas or Dustin or _you_ , and more like how I feel about—about El.”

“You can’t like two people,” Max said. “Not that way.”

Mike tipped his chin up and replied, “Why not?”

“Because—because you _can’t_. It’s impossible.”

“Like mind-controlling monsters from another dimension are impossible? Like girls with superpowers are impossible?”

“That’s not the same thing at all.”

“Why is that not the same thing? They’re things that you think can’t possibly be real until they just happen to you and then—”

“Look, whatever, maybe it’s possible, I don’t know! The important thing is, what are you gonna do?”

“I don’t know, that’s the problem! What do you think I should do? Do you think I should tell El about it? Or Will? What if El is mad at me, what if she breaks up with me? And Will—oh my god, what if Will _hates_ me, what if he never talks to me again, and—”

Max tuned out Mike’s increasingly anxious rambling. A sick feeling churned at the pit of his stomach as she imagined the effect this bombshell would have on their friend group. If Mike and El broke up for real, if they broke up because of _Will_ , the party would implode from the impact. Max would have to side with El, out of female solidarity, Lucas and Dustin would have to side with Mike because they’d been friends longer, so _she and Lucas_ would be on opposite sides, and Will… Did he reciprocate Mike’s feelings, by the way? _Goddamn it, he probably does._ She’d always found Mike and Will’s relationship oddly intense, and this hadn’t come from Mike only. But Will and El lived together and Will sort of shared his mother and brother with El, so what would happen to that if they became romantic rivals? This would be a disaster. The party would split apart. Max would lose the best friends she’d ever had. 

“You—” Her mouth was dry and she had to swallow. “You shouldn’t say anything.”

“You think?” 

She’d told El that she should force Mike to give her answers and now she was telling Mike the opposite. She was being a horrible friend, but she didn’t know what else to do. Her stomach swooped with nausea and she dug her fingernails in the palm of her hands to distract herself from the feeling.

“Yeah,” she said. “You said you love El, don’t you?” He nodded vigorously and she went on, “So it’s all that matters. You’re happy with her, so why ruin it? You don’t even know if Will likes you back.”

“You may be right.” He rubbed his eyes and sniffed once. “Thank you. Sorry for… vomiting all this at your feet.”

“Well, I kind of forced your hand.” 

Mike was a sorry sight with his red-rimmed eyes and his tear-stained cheeks. Now that she was a little less stunned by his revelation, it occurred to Max how much courage it must have taken him to tell her something so huge—not just that he liked Will, but that he liked boys in general. There were a lot of people, at school and outside, who would make his life a living hell if they even got a whiff of it.

“Hey, Mike,” she said.

“Yeah?” He’d pushed the door an inch or so open and was peeking out through the gap. “What is it?”

God, this was so awkward. But he was her friend and friends were supposed to support each other, or so the party’s golden rule said. “You know that you—that there’s nothing wrong with you liking a boy, right?”

Mike closed the door again and raked his fingers through his hair. “It’s so confusing,” he said softly. “I know I’m not _gay_ because I like El, but—”

“Some people like both boys and girls.”

“Oh, okay. Good to know, I guess.”

“So you’re not weird or anything—well, you _are_ , but not because of that.”

“Okay.”

“And so I just… I mean, I have your back.”

“Thanks, Max,” he said, the corner of his mouth turning up.

She cleared her throat. “Now let’s get the hell out of here. Move your ass.”

She pushed him through the door and they stumbled together out of the stall. Fortunately, the bathroom was empty. They were careful when they left to check if the way was clear and Max was fairly sure that no one had seen them. The last thing they needed was a rumor that she was cheating on Lucas with _Mike_.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I love Mike & Max's vitriolic buds dynamic so much. Hope you enjoyed the new chapter!


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Brace yourself, this is a long one.

Insomnia was a bitch. It shot Mike’s concentration to hell, made him irritable and achy as well as paranoid, instilling in him the feeling that everything was about to crash down over his head. Or maybe that wasn’t paranoia at all, just a realistic sense of his own doom. When Max had told him he shouldn’t say anything, he had nodded along, but deep down he knew that he couldn’t hide this from Eleven forever. He wasn’t _lying_ , exactly, but it felt like he was. What he was keeping from her was too big, too essential, and she knew that something was off. Only a year ago, it had been hard for her to pick up subtle cues and read complex emotions, but they spent too much time together and she was a fast learner. 

On Tuesday evening, they were both sitting on the Byerses’ couch and not talking much, which gave Mike way too much time to think. The TV was on, but Mike had stopped paying attention to it a long time ago. Jonathan and Joyce were both at work, although Joyce called at least once every hour; Will was in his room and no amount of coaxing from Mike and El had managed to lure him out. Mike’s worry about Will was a monster that had settled in his stomach and was gnawing at it from the inside, but right now he was glad to be alone with his girlfriend. He couldn’t even _think_ about telling Will what he was about to tell El without being overwhelmed by anxiety so powerful he was afraid he would give himself another panic attack. The simple thought that he could damage their friendship for good and lose Will altogether was too horrible to contemplate. 

“El?”

“Yes?”

“Can you—can you turn off the TV for a second?”

El gave the TV such an intense look that Mike suspected her of trying to turn it off with her powers, like she used to do. When that didn’t work, she grabbed the remote and clicked the TV shut. 

“What is it?”

“I—” He’d composed a speech for this, but the words he’d prepared had flown out of his mind and left it blank. “I love you,” he blurted out. This wasn’t how he’d meant to start it. He could see the line of her mouth go soft, like she was about to smile, and it made him feel like a manipulative piece of shit. But he went on in that same vein, because it was important that she got this part. “You know that, right?”

“I know. I lo—”

“No, no,” Mike said, cutting her off. He didn’t want to hear it only for her to maybe take it back in a few minutes. “I’m not saying it because I want you to say it back. I just—I need you to believe it. The last couple of years, we’ve been through a lot, and many horrible things have happened that have left their mark, and… I wish those things hadn’t happened. Most of those things. But I can’t really regret that they have, because if not for that month of November two years ago, I would never have met you. And I wouldn’t know what I was missing, I guess, but I can’t help but think that somewhere, deep down, there would be, I don’t know… An empty space or something, where you should be.”

He paused to catch his breath and order his thoughts. Outside the wind was howling as loudly as the Mind Flayer had during the Battle of Starcourt and heavy rain pattered against the roof and the windows like a shower of small pebbles. Eleven was looking at him, her brown eyes serious and deep; the affectionate expression on her face had left place to wariness, like she’d realized that his rambling declaration of love was leading up to something less pleasant. 

“Mike,” she said very softly. “What _is_ it?” 

“I—I just wanted to make it clear that what I’m about to say does not change in any way the way I feel about you. You believe it, don’t you?”

“Mike.”

“Okay, okay, getting to the point.” Almost involuntarily, Mike lowered his voice for the rest of his confession. If Will heard this, Mike would… die on the spot or something. “I realized something recently. On Halloween. But it’s been building up for a lot longer, I just didn’t really understand it before that day. I—I—I have—I feel—I have feelings for someone else too. And the crazy part is, that person is a _boy_. You know how I explained to you that some guys like other guys—and some girls like other girls too, I guess, although that’s not really the—”

“Faggot,” Eleven said.

It was impossible to tell what she was thinking, as her face was perfectly expressionless, like it had been in the early times when he’d just met her. To hear _that_ word in _her_ mouth caused a stabbing pain to shoot through his chest, even though he knew she was just repeating something she’d heard and not trying to insult him.

“Yeah, but remember, you shouldn’t use that word,” he said, incapable of keeping himself from babbling, “because it’s bad and only bad people say it when they want to be cruel. You know, like Will’s dad. The proper word for it is _gay_ , although I don’t think I’m gay because I still love you, right, so that means I love boys and _girls_ , and M—someone told me that it was a thing but I don’t know what it’s called.”

“Will,” Eleven said.

“Wh-what?” Mike jumped and whirled around, expecting Will to show up at his back so tonight could truly be the worst moment of Mike’s entire life. But Will wasn’t there and Mike turned back to El, confused. “What do you mean?”

“Will is the person you love.”

She’d used the word ‘ _love_.’ None of that childish ‘like- _like_ ’; she’d gone straight for the big L word like she could see clearly into Mike’s heart. It made him feel like someone who was undergoing heart surgery and had woken up too early, right in the middle of the operation, enabling him to look at his own pulsing, bloody organ.

“One of the two people I love,” he corrected weakly. 

This was the terrible, terrifying truth, laid out in Eleven’s simple words. He was in love with two people, one of who was a girl and the other a boy, for an extra scoop of freaky with cherry on top. Not just crushing, not just attracted, but straight up In Love, twice over. Nancy claimed that their own parents had never been in love for real but he, Michael Wheeler, fourteen years old going on fifteen, former president of Hawkins Middle School’s AV club, was in love with two people. This was greedy, right? This couldn’t be allowed. There had to be rules against that kind of thing.

Eleven had completely retreated behind her mask of guardedness and wasn’t saying anything, just looking at him. Mike’s pulse was racing impossibly fast, making him wonder just how many beats a minute a heart could stand before it gave out. If El had her powers back, would she be throwing him across the room right now? Did it make it better for her that the other person Mike loved was someone she also cared about, or did it just add another layer of betrayal?

“Say something,” he said, not caring if it sounded like he was begging. 

“I’m tired,” she declared.

This was a lie; he was sure of it. El was _lying_ to his face. Well, that was it, then. He’d expected her to be mad at him, but this was so, so much worse. He stood up from the couch, feeling like he was moving in a dream, and picked up his school bag, still slightly damp from his rainy ride to the Byerses’. He glanced one more time at Eleven to see whether she would call him back, but she’d turned away and was fiddling with the remote control. He thought about throwing a last ‘I love you’ at her, but _that_ would have been manipulative, like he wanted to guilt-trip her. So he just mumbled a subdued, “Goodbye,” grabbed his raincoat on his way to the front door and exited into the night. Maybe he should have gone and knocked on Will’s bedroom door to tell him he was leaving, but talking to Will was honestly beyond what he had the strength for at the moment. 

The next day was the first time Mike was grateful for the fact that El didn’t go to school with them, because he didn’t think he would have been able to hang out with her the whole day and pretend that everything was okay to their friends. As it was, they probably could tell that he wasn’t okay, but as November 6 and then 7 rolled by, they very likely assumed that Mike was moody and quiet for the same reason that Will was, the same reason why Dustin and Lucas were a little off too. Max was the only one unaffected, but knowing what those dates meant for them she did her best to bear the gloomy cloud that loomed over the group. Mike had been afraid that El might have called her after her conversation with Mike, but if she had then Max would have already mentioned it to him, probably right before she promised him a slow death. 

It wasn’t hard to pretend that his mood was only affected by the anniversary effect, because his thoughts did turn that way a lot, but more on the 7th than on the 6th—on November 6, Mike, Lucas and Dustin hadn’t known yet that something bad had happened. But Mike remembered going to school the next day, Joyce Byers’ worried call to his mom in the morning, not seeing Will’s bike at the rack and then Hopper coming to interview them, opening a pit under Mike’s feet. He wondered if he would ever go through November 7 without thinking about it.

By the time class ended, he was more than ready to head straight home and go mope in his room. Because it was the sort of day where everything that could go wrong did go wrong, the chain on his bike had jumped off and he was having a hard time fixing it, maybe because he was utterly out of patience with everything. He sent his friends off, not wanting them to wait for him despite the unfriendly weather, but for some reason Will lingered behind.

“You can go, Will,” Mike said, wiping rain off his eyes and cursing when the bike’s chain slipped from his fingers. “It’s raining, you’d better go home.”

“Is everything okay with you and El?” Will asked. 

Mike felt like he’d been kneed in the chest, all the air leaving his lungs at once. “What—what did El say?”

“She didn’t say anything, it’s just… You haven’t come by in a few days. You haven’t called her on the walkie. It’s not like you.”

“How do you know I haven’t called her?”

“The walls at my house aren’t that thick, Mike,” Will said. “I don’t hear what you talk about or anything, but I know when El is talking to you. Is it—” Will’s fingers, white from the cold, played nervously with the strap of his backpack. He looked exhausted, his eyes bruised like he’d been punched in the face, and Mike wanted to hold him and make him feel better so desperately it was like a physical ache. “Is it because of me?”

“What?”

“I know I’ve been—distant, lately, I haven’t been a good friend at all, to you or to El or to the others. So I was just wondering if you were maybe fed up with me, and that’s why you didn’t—”

“Will, no!” Mike jumped to his feet, dropping his bike on its left flank. His heart was going _tap-tap-tap_ in his chest like the flapping wings of a bird. “Why would you think that? I don’t—I’m not mad at you or anything. Or mad at Eleven. It’s just, I’ve been tired, that’s all. I’m not sleeping well.”

“Oh, okay.” Will’s shoulders sagged, which made Mike realize how tense he’d been. “Would you come and watch a movie at my house, then? I would have invited the others too, but I’m, uh, not up for big groups of people right now. So it would be just you, and me and El—unless you want some alone time with El, of course.”

“No, it’s fine. You and me and El. It’ll be fun.”

 _Fun_ wasn’t really the word he wanted to use to describe the prospect of being stuck on a couch with Will and El, especially without being sure of where he stood with El. He’d tried to talk to her on the walkie talkie, but she’d never answered. Had they broken up? Was she just taking some time to think? He was driving himself mad thinking about it. But Will reaching out and initiating an activity was such a rarity lately that Mike didn’t have the heart to deny him.

On their way to Will’s house, they made a detour by the video rental store where Steve and Robin worked. Steve wasn’t in, but Robin was. 

“Hey, kids,” she said, making her chewing gum snap. “Having a movie night? What are you in the mood for?”

Mike and Will shared a look and then Mike said, hoping he was reading the strain in Will’s expression correctly, “I don’t know, something funny, I think. Any recommendations?”

Mike didn’t know what Steve might have told Robin about the events of the previous years, but her gaze went from Mike to Will, and then back to Mike, so swiftly it was barely noticeable, just a moment of internal pause. 

“Something funny,” she repeated, tapping the tip of her index against her chin. “Sure thing. I’ll dig something up for you.” 

She came back with _Airplane!_ , which both Mike and Will had already seen, _Caddyshack_ and _Vacation_. Mike looked at Will to check if the movies were okay with him, but Will only shrugged. “I’ll probably just fall asleep midway,” he said. “I don’t think El has seen either of these. Let’s take both.”

To say that Mike was on tenterhooks about El’s reaction to seeing him would have been an understatement. He’d assured Will that everything was okay between them, but it would be immediately exposed as a lie if El yelled at him and demanded he be thrown out of the house. In the end, her reaction wasn’t nearly as dramatic as he’d imagined it would be. If she was surprised by his presence, she didn’t show it, only smiled at him and greeted him with a cordial enough, “Hey, Mike.”

Of course, on a normal day she would have jumped into his arms and kissed him, so her tepid greeting earned her an odd look from Will, who fortunately thought better of asking either of them about it. He wasn’t an idiot, though, and he knew both Mike and Eleven well. He found himself in the unenviable position of being stuck between the two of them, so he wouldn’t hold back his questions forever. How he would react to the reveal that _he_ was at the heart of their issues was something that kept Mike awake at night. 

“Will wanted us to watch a movie,” Mike said to Eleven, hoping to convey to her the message that they should strike a truce for tonight at least, for Will’s sake. “We got two.”

“What did you get?” she asked with what looked like genuine interest.

El _loved_ TV; the small screen had been an object of immense fascination to her since she’d discovered it for the first time in Mike’s house. She hadn’t gone to the cinema yet, but the first time they went promised to be a treat—as soon as he had that thought, Mike’s heart sunk as he remembered that his chances to share this experience with her currently seemed to be abysmal. He wouldn’t get to see her joy and awe, her excitement. Maybe today was the last movie he would ever watch with Eleven.

Their sitting arrangement on the couch was another awkward moment when Eleven sat on Will’s other side, away from Mike. Normally she would be tucked against Mike’s flank in such a way that he could sometimes feel her small breasts press against his side, but of course there wouldn’t be any of this today. Will raised both eyebrows at them, still not commenting on the situation but definitely getting more and more perturbed. This sunk Mike’s mood to underground levels of low and he didn’t register much of the movie. It must have been funny, because Eleven burst out laughing several times and it even wrenched a few chuckles out of Will. The Byerses’ couch was pretty narrow, so each time Will laughed Mike could feel the vibrations reverberate through his own body. They’d sat in that same couch or at Mike’s house, knee to knee and shoulder to shoulder, hundreds of times or more in the past. It had never felt like this, like every part of Mike’s body that touched Will’s was ignited with a little _zeet_ of electricity that ran over his skin. He was embarrassed, and he was depressed, and he wished that he were anywhere but here, even though he was watching a funny movie with his two favorite people in the world. It was just all _wrong_ —wrong that he couldn’t hug El to his side like he’d gotten used too, wrong that he couldn’t relax in Will’s presence because his messed-up mind and body had decided that he wanted more than the easy friendship they’d always shared. He felt like a robot that had been rebooted with a weird new programming and that _sucked_.

After the movie, Jonathan came back and they had dinner with him. Somehow, Mike managed to keep chatting during the meal as though nothing was wrong, about school, about comic books, about the movie they’d just watched and which he’d only half-followed. Jonathan didn’t seem to notice anything wrong, although maybe he was just in a hurry to go on the date he had with Mike’s sister—which, _ugh_ , the least Mike thought about it, the better he was. Right when Mike, Will and Eleven were getting ready to watch the second movie, Joyce Byers came back home, shaking water off her coat.

“Brr, that weather. Oh, hey, Mike,” she said, sounding like she was genuinely happy he’d come by. 

She kissed Will, El and then Mike, something she’d only started to do last year. He knew that she was grateful for ‘everything he’d done for Will’ because she’d told him so in those words. He wondered what she would think if she had an inkling about the exact nature of Mike’s feelings for her son.

“What’re you watching?” she asked.

Eleven had been about to get the VHS into the VCR when Joyce had entered. She looked at the case and read in that halted way of hers, “ _Vacation_.”

“I haven’t seen this one,” Joyce said. “Is it long? Because maybe you’d better—”

“It’s Friday night, mom,” Will said. At the undercurrent of annoyance in his tone, Mike gathered that this was a topic that he and his mother had already argued about. 

“I know, sweetie, but you’ve been really tired lately so you should—”

“It’s useless to go to bed early if I’m not going to sleep anyway. I’d rather spend that time with my friends.”

Will’s fists were clenched in his lap and he was staring at the TV’s blank screen rather than looking at his mother. Mike felt a startling urge to take his hand, uncurl his fingers and soothe the tension out of them, so he tucked his own hands under his thighs to stifle it.

“All right,” Joyce said in a sad, defeated voice, her face bleached by the bluish glow of the TV. “I think I’ll just go to bed. Come and get me if you need anything.”

“We, uh, we left you some mac and cheese,” Mike said.

“You’re sweet, but I’m not very hungry. Oh, but, Mike, are you staying tonight? Do you want to call your mom to ask?”

“Oh, um.” From across Will, Mike caught Eleven’s eyes, but he couldn’t read anything helpful in them. “I don’t think so. I think my mom would rather I go home.”

“Of course. Well, enjoy your movie.”

Mike was even more distracted for the second movie than he’d been for the first; so distracted, in fact, that he only started to pay attention to the screen when El said, “You said that this was a funny movie.”

Mike looked at the TV and saw a man puttering about in a lab. The lighting of the scene was reddish and the music foreboding, punctuated by the sudden honks of a trumpet. “Uh, maybe they put the wrong VHS in the wrong case—” The man had spilled something on his lab coat and a worm-like thing was burning a hole in it, burrowing its way into the screaming man’s skin. “Ouch. Yeah, I think there was a mistake.”

There wasn’t much to alert Mike that something was wrong, but he’d become a master at catching those minute signs. Back when Will’s visions had been symptoms of the Mind Flayer’s hold on him, he’d been prone to wandering away, fully immersed in whatever he was seeing. Now that it was all in his head, it manifested in less obvious ways and it was only through changes in his breathing, a sudden stillness in his posture, that Mike could tell that Will was having a flashback.

“Will?” Mike said softly. He knew not to touch Will when he was like this, so he kept his hands to himself, but sometimes the sound of his voice was enough to bring Will back. This time, though, Will didn’t react, just looking at the screen with wide eyes. El had paused the movie and the image of the worm thing on the man’s wounded skin quivered at them.

“Will,” El said, “It’s me, Eleven. You’re home and you’re safe. I’m here with you and Mike is here too.” 

“Yeah,” Mike said. “We’re here with you. Your mom is in her room.”

Will took a gasping breath and scrambled off the couch. He was shaking so hard he tripped on his own feet, caught himself on the arm of the couch and collapsed over it, sliding down to his knees.

“Will, shit!” Mike shot off his seat and rushed to his friend’s side, going down to his knees in front of him. Instinctively, he reached out, but stopped himself in time and let his hands hover awkwardly over Will’s trembling form. “Will, it’s okay, you’re okay, I’m here, nothing can hurt you—”

Will made a gagging sound and turned around, but instead of puking, like Mike had fully expected he would, he just spat on the floor. Mike watched bemusedly as he did it several more times, then shoved fingers in his mouth like he was trying to wipe it clean from the inside. 

“Can still taste it, oh god, can still taste,” Will chanted between gagging, crying and spitting on the floor. “Can’t get rid of it, that awful taste—”

“The taste of what?” Mike asked.

“Flesh, _human_ flesh,” Will sobbed. He was on his hands and knees now, shaking violently, a trickle of spit hanging from his lips.

Oh, _hell_. Was he talking about when he’d sent those soldiers to their deaths? Had Will been aware of _that_? They’d never talked about what Will retained from his connection to the hive mind, but maybe he hadn’t remembered this moment at all until the movie had triggered it. 

“El, go get him a glass of water,” Mike said.

He heard the patter of El’s feet as she hurried to the kitchen but kept his eyes solely on Will, who was still trembling and crying. Joyce must have been sleeping very deeply if she hadn’t been woken up by the ruckus, and it occurred to Mike that maybe she was better equipped than him to deal with this.

“Do you want me to get your mom?” he asked hesitantly, remembering the scene from earlier.

“No,” Will said, shaking his head forcefully. He took a gulping breath and sat down, leaning against the side of the couch. His face was streaked with tears and snot but he looked back at Mike with fully lucid eyes. “No, I’m okay,” he said, his voice hoarse and thick. “She’s just going to worry.”

“Yeah, well, _I_ ’m freaking out right here,” Mike said. 

He regretted his words, which he’d sort of meant as a joke, when Will turned wet, worried eyes at him. Yeah, the joking part didn’t land as well when he’d _literally_ freaked out on Halloween because Will had wandered out of his sight for a minute. 

“Are you okay?” Will asked. 

Will’s eyes were still leaking tears, his hands were shaking, and they were sitting right next to a pool of his drying saliva, but the concern in his voice was so genuine that Mike’s heart felt like it was about to burst from sudden emotion. “Am _I_ okay?” he asked, his voice a little strangled. “Jesus, Will.”

El came back at that moment with a glass of water and Mike shuffled away from Will to make room for her. Will took the glass with a poor, unconvincing smile of thanks, and drunk from it greedily, pausing sometimes to slosh the water inside his mouth, probably trying to get rid of the taste he’d mentioned. Whether it worked on something that Will’s mind had conjured was a question that Mike didn’t dare ask.

“Thank you,” Will said, putting the empty glass down on the floor next to him. His breathing still wasn’t completely controlled and the trembling had yet to subside, but he looked a bit calmer now.

“Feeling better?” El asked. 

Will nodded. “Sorry,” he said.

“Don’t be stupid,” Mike said. “Let me help you get up.”

He got up on his feet and then reach down to Will, who took his outstretched hand and hauled himself up. He wavered and Mike grabbed his elbow to stabilize him. With a little puff of breath, Will half-slumped against him, his forehead nestled in the crook of Mike’s neck. It set Mike’s face aflame and sent his heard into overdrive; with only a vague awareness of what he was doing, he lifted a hand and cradled the back of Will’s neck with it. 

And then he heard a rustle of clothes and saw that El was standing right behind his elbow, watching him—watching _them_ , and seeing the scene for the incriminating thing it was, knowing he wasn’t just being a good friend to a distressed Will. She had that odd, closed-off look on her face, and it scared him shitless because it made her feel far away even when she was standing so close. He wanted to talk to her, to beg her to finally _say_ something, but with Will there he couldn’t and the words got stuck in his throat. 

“Sorry,” Will said again, drawing away from Mike. He pulled on his sweater’s sleeve and used it to wipe his face. “Ugh, I’m a mess.”

“Maybe you should take a shower,” Mike said.

“Maybe.” Will sat down heavily on the arm of the couch. “I don’t know if I can stay up on my feet for a whole shower, though.”

“I—” Mike’s face flooded with warmth when he realized he’d been about to suggest he go in with Will. “Ah, uh, you—you—could just wash your face, I guess,” he sputtered like the dumbass he was.

Even in his current state of mind, Will couldn’t miss that something was off. “You okay?” he said, frowning.

“What? Yeah!” Mike was sure his face must be as red as a tomato right now. “I’m fine, yeah, why wouldn’t I be?”

“Mike, I’ve known you since kindergarten. You’re a _bad_ liar.”

“Tell him,” El said.

She had barely addressed him directly for the whole evening, so Mike gaped at her, startled, almost convinced that he’d imagined her talking to him, before her words finally registered. 

“El,” he said, heartbroken, his eyes filling with tears. What she was talking about seemed pretty clear to him, but if she wanted him to confess to Will then it had to mean that she was done with him. “Please.”

“It’s okay,” she said, and at last she smiled—it was a tiny, tentative smile that reminded him of the way she’d smiled before she got the hang of it, but it did reach her eyes. She took his hand and squeezed his fingers in her palm. “I love you too. It’s going to be okay.”

“Eleven, I can’t.”

“What’s going on?” Will asked. “I mean, I didn’t want to bother you with my questions before but _what_ is going on? You—you’re not breaking up, are you?”

Mike couldn’t have answered even if his life had depended on it but then El said, “No, we’re not,” and he felt like he could finally _breathe_ again.

“We had, uh, a bit of an argument,” he said to Will, giddiness and terror at war in his chest. “I, uh, I told El something big, that affected our relationship and, well—it concerns you too.”

“Me?” Will said, his forehead now deeply furrowed with confusion. 

Mike took a deep breath. It was a huge, terrifying thing he was about to do, but with El holding his hand he felt braver, more optimistic, more confident that he wasn’t about to blow his relationship with Will to pieces. 

“I figured out that I like you.” He’d said it quickly, in one breath, and it felt the same as jumping off the cliff at the quarry to save Dustin. 

Will still looked confused. “You… like me? What does that mean?”

“Uh, well, I,” Mike stammered, feeling his confidence crumble again at having to explain himself. Saying ‘ _I love you_ ’ felt too big to be uttered without getting choked on it, so he settled for, “I mean that I _like_ you. As, uh, more than a friend. You know?”

Watching Will’s expression darken certainly did nothing to make him feel better. “You’re joking,” Will said, not making it sound like a question. “You’re making fun of me.”

“Making fun of you? No! Why would I do that? Make fun of what?”

“You know why. You _have_ to know.” Will’s face was getting red, but less like he was embarrassed and more like he was furious. “You know that—I don’t _like girls_.”

Will pitched his voice in an odd way for those last words, and it took Mike a moment to understand that it was meant as a poor imitation of _him_ when he’d said that during their argument this summer. Damn, he’d really screwed up that day, hadn’t he? He hadn’t known for sure that Will didn’t like girls _that way_ and it had come out all wrong. Will’s reaction to his words had been pretty damning, but they’d never talked about it again and at the time Mike had been nowhere close to understanding his own feelings for Will. 

“That’s… Okay, but I don’t get what—”

“How could you not know that I like _you_?”

 _Wait, what?_ Mike almost asked Will to repeat himself but it seemed likely to make him even angrier. He probably should have been happy to hear that Will felt the same as he did—though it made everything more of a complicated mess than it already was—but watching the thunderous look on Will’s face, it didn’t feel like a cause for celebration. It rather felt like everything had spiraled totally out of control in a way he hadn’t anticipated at all.

“Why would I… I mean, you not liking—” _Use the word, you coward._ “You being _gay_ doesn’t have to mean that you like _me_. That’s, like, there’s no logical cause to effect relation between the—"

“Don’t give me your condescending bull—”

“Will,” El said loudly, stopping him in his momentum. He looked startled at her intervention, like he’d almost forgotten she was there. “Friends don’t lie. Mike isn’t lying.”

“I’ve told El about it before I told you, man,” Mike said. “And then we didn’t speak for three days. Believe me, I really don’t feel like joking about this.”

“But… I don’t get it. What about El?”

“Well, that’s the thing.” Mike clutched El’s hand harder, reassuring himself that she hadn’t let go. “I like both of you. And, honestly, I had no idea of your feelings for me, I swear to god—I just couldn’t keep it to myself anymore and I was just hoping you wouldn’t hate me or something.”

“I couldn’t hate you,” Will murmured. He sucked in a breath and rubbed his face with both hands. “So that’s it, then? You—like me, and I like you, but you and El love each other so everything is just going to be the same except that we—”

He let his sentence die there and his eyes met Mike’s, who felt like he’d been slapped. Presented like that, it did sound pretty depressing. Mike didn’t want to stop being friends with Will, of course not, but now that everything was out in the open, things were going to change whether they wanted it or not. The lingering tension between them that Mike could feel now more strongly than ever would have to _go_ somewhere. Would it simmer down or would it poison their friendship? And while it seemed unfair that Mike had El but Will had no one, the idea of Will getting a boyfriend who wasn’t him made Mike sick to his stomach. 

“I don’t know what to do,” he said helplessly. 

“ _I_ have an idea,” El said slowly. 

Mike and Will both stared at her for a moment and then Will shook his head like he wanted to get water out his ears. “I, uh, I need a moment. This is a lot to take in, I feel weird and gross, and I just need to clean up and have a moment.” He pushed himself off the arm of the couch and took a few steps toward the bathroom. Mike must have looked as forlorn as he felt, because Will turned back and said, “I’ll be right back, okay? And then we’ll talk. Just wait for me.” 

“Okay, sure.”

Mike and El sat down on the couch as they waited for Will, still holding hands like a pair of kindergarteners. Mike was so nervous that he couldn’t keep his right leg from twitching uncontrollably. After a few minutes of that, incapable of sitting still any longer, he got up and went to get the movie they’d been watching from the VCR.

“ _Parasite_ ,” he read on the label. “Damn.” Yeah, there’d been a really big mistake. If Mike got his hands on the asshole who’d mixed up the cases—well, he would shout really angrily at them or something. And weren’t the employees supposed to check the VHS that were returned? What had Steve and Robin been doing? 

“So what’s your idea?” he asked El after putting the VHS back into its mislabeled case, his foot tapping restlessly against the floor. 

“We have to wait for Will.”

“Okay, no spoilers. Got it.”

This evening was just a rollercoaster of emotions and he wasn’t sure he had the stomach for it. He’d faced actual monsters and shady people from the government, but these feelings that only seemed to become more complicated and intense the older he got felt even scarier to him, in a way. He didn’t know what El’s idea might be, but he was sure that when Will came out of the bathroom, everything would be irrevocably changed. 

—-

Splashing water on his face only made Will feel marginally better, but he would take any amount of not feeling like complete shit that he could get. The flashback had been the worst he’d had in a really long time, and just from a stupid _movie_ —the thought had barely gone through his head that he felt the dark memories brush against his mind once more, sea monsters lurking just beneath the surface. He breathed through his mouth and tried to focus on that, on the rush of air in and out, on the buzzing from the neon light above the bathroom mirror, on the pain in his fingers from how hard his hands were clamped around the edge of the sink. This was a balancing exercise, like walking on a ledge next to an abyss. One wrong step, and he would tumble into the darkness. His eyes avoided his reflection in the mirror, because he knew he looked awful and that wasn’t something he could change in a few minutes. Only several nights of sound, uninterrupted sleep would be able to help, but he wouldn’t get that before he had to go back to the living room and talk to Mike and El.

Mike liked him. Mike Wheeler _liked_ him. “ _Fuck_ ,” Will said under his breath. He rarely ever swore, and to hear the word said out loud in his own voice almost made him flinch.

It still felt like a joke or a misunderstanding, to be honest, but even when Will had gotten mad at Mike for making fun of him, he’d known deep down that he was being unfair. Mike wouldn’t make such a cruel joke, and the meaning of his words had been pretty clear. Not a joke then, not a misunderstanding; just the craziest thing to have happened to Will, and he was someone who’d been trapped in a nightmarish alternate dimension and possessed by a tentacled monster. 

He forced himself to let go of the sink. “Be brave,” he murmured.

Bob—sweet, goofy Bob, who’d died horribly because of Will—had told him once the story of how he’d overcome his fear of clowns by standing up to the one that haunted his nightmares. When Will had tried to follow that piece of advice it had horribly backfired on him, but he thought that it might apply here too. The last thing he wanted to do was to walk out of that bathroom and talk to Mike and El. His head pounded, his eyes were puffy and sensitive, and he felt worn-out, stretched too thin, so low on emotional resources that he feared he might just stop functioning at any moment, like a car that had run out of gas. He wanted to go back to keeping his feelings for Mike to himself, a secret wound that he poked at from time to time, the pain almost a comfort because it was so familiar. The idea of things changing felt scary. But he wasn’t the only one involved here; this affected Mike and El too, and he would have done just about anything for the two of them. So he rubbed his face vigorously with his palms, took a few deep breaths, and left the bathroom.

El and Mike were on the couch but Mike jumped out of it when he saw Will. “Hey,” he said, shifting his weight from one foot to the other, like Will had been gone for five hours rather than five minutes. It was so absurd that Will started laughing, unable to control the impulse. 

“Uh, what?” Mike said, looking half confused and half like he was wondering whether he should be offended. This was more adorable than it should have been.

“Sorry,” Will said, swallowing back the laughter that bubbled in his throat. “Nerves. I think we should, uh, go talk in my room.”

If his mom hadn’t woken up when he’d had his episode earlier, then she would probably remain dead to the world until morning, but Will still didn’t want to risk her overhearing the conversation they were about to have. Mike and El nodded and followed him into his room. Will sat on his bed, El on the floor, and Mike didn’t sit down, preferring to stand and fidget nervously. 

“So, El, you had something to tell us,” Mike said. “What’s your idea?”

“I love you,” El said with a sweet smile to him, “and you love Will, and Will loves you.”

Will’s heart skipped a beat—Mike hadn’t used the word ‘love’, but he didn’t oppose it. His eyes shifted to Will very quickly and he blushed. Will felt his own face heat up in sympathy.

“I want all of us to be happy,” El went on, “I thought about it for a long time and here’s my idea: what if we were all together? Then none of us would be left out.”

Will had been absorbed in his contemplation of Mike’s blush and he felt his brain screech to a halt. “What?” he said.

“Wait a minute,” Mike said. “What do you mean? Like, all of us dating each other? You being my girlfriend and Will being—” His blush darkened as he completed his sentence. “—my boyfriend?”

“Yes,” El said. “Like that.”

“How would that work?” Will said. “Dating is for two people—that’s why we say they’re a ‘couple.’ It’s just impossible.”

“A lot of impossible things have happened to us,” Mike murmured with a thoughtful look on his face, like he was echoing a memory.

“That’s not the same thing, though,” Will said.

“Why, though?” Mike asked, suddenly animated. “What’s so different? Look at how crazy things have been for us those past two years! Why should the weird stuff in our lives only be the scary stuff? Why can’t we do something weird that also makes us happy? We don’t have to be limited by what other people do.”

Mike moved toward him and Will thought he would sit on the bed with him, but instead he dropped to his knees at Will’s feet. It looked so much like a guy proposing to his girlfriend that Will’s heart started to pump hard, sending more blood to his face, the sudden heat making him dizzy.

“If you don’t want to do it,” Mike said, his face turned up at Will, “then just say the word. I’m not gonna force you. But who cares if no one has ever done this before? We’ll figure it out. We’ve done much scarier things.”

Will wasn’t sure he agreed, or at least he felt that _this_ was scary in a very different way from everything he’d had to endure before. Something that Mike had said had struck a chord, though: all the big life-changing events he’d gone through had been horrible. His dad leaving, the Upside Down, the Mind Flayer, Bob and Hopper dying—all harrowing, all out of his control. This time it promised to be something good, hopefully, and he would get into it of his own free will. He was finally given a choice.

“El?” he said hesitantly, searching her face for a hint of doubt or worry. She looked calm, determined. “Are you sure about this? You won’t, like, resent me for making you share Mike?”

“It’s _my_ idea,” she reminded him.

“Yeah, I know, but—”

She shuffled closer to him and took his hand. “Will,” she said simply, managing to inject his name with a wealth of emotions that said more than a ten-page speech. 

Now both Mike and El were at his feet, looking up at him with eyes alight with resolve, and Will was getting choked up. After his episode from earlier, this was too much emotion, too extreme an opposite from the horror of his flashback. 

“Aw, man, Will,” Mike said and put a hand on Will’s knee. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have—”

“No, it’s okay,” Will said, wiping his eyes. “I’m kind of all over the place right now, that’s all. But I, yeah—I want to do it. I don’t know how we’ll manage it, but I want to try.”

El’s face lit up excitedly and Mike said, “Great, that’s, uh, that’s awesome.” His hand on Will’s knee tightened its grip. “Can I kiss you, then?”

“Oh, uh.” Kissing was part and parcel of dating someone, and yet the request took Will completely by surprise. He thought again about how terrible he must look, what with the lack of sleep and all the crying he’d done earlier. He probably didn’t have a very kissable face right now. Was Mike asking because he felt like he had to? To seal the deal, so to speak?

“It’s okay if you don’t want to,” Mike said very fast, but Will knew him and he knew that look on his face—this was Mike’s disappointed face. Amazingly, it looked like Mike wanted to kiss him for real. 

“Yeah,” Will said. “Sure.”

Mike reached out and Will thought that he was going to pull him in, but instead he brushed off strands of hair that were wet from when Will had splashed water on his face, fingertips grazing Will’s forehead. His fingers stroked down the side of Will’s face and his thumb drew a half-circle over the apple of Will’s cheek. The tenderness in that gesture was more than Will could handle, a stab right through his heart, and he bit the inside of his cheek so he wouldn’t start crying again.

“Is it supposed to take so long?” he tried to joke, but with the way his voice got strangled it didn’t sound as playful as he’d meant it to be. 

“Shut up,” Mike said. “I want to remember that moment.”

He rose up on his knees so he and Will were at a level. Will’s hands had started to sweat profusely and he wiped them on his pants several times, to very little effect. 

“Yeah?” Mike asked in a soft voice.

“If we were playing D&D,” Will said, “you would be yelling at me to make my action already.”

Mike laughed, his face inching closer to Will’s until Will could feel the puffs of his breath against his lips. “You nerd,” he said.

“Right back at you,” Will said, and then Mike was kissing him.

There were moments that stretched so extensively that one minute could feel like an hour. Until now, Will had experienced this phenomenon mostly when something bad was happening, whether external or internal—a flashback, for example, could last a few seconds for everyone else but feel like it would never end from his point of view. Mike’s kiss felt a bit like this, but on the flip side, the _good_ side. Will’s pulse thumped at the surface of his skin, his whole body singing with it. Mike’s lips brushed his and he could feel the scrape of every bit of dead skin from Mike biting on his lip too much, like the ridges of a fingerprint. His lips were warm, too, so warm they set Will’s face on fire. He wanted to move his hands and touch Mike, wanted to move his lips and reciprocate the kiss, because kissing was supposed to be a mutual activity, but he was so afraid of doing something wrong that would make Mike stop that he just kept very still, barely breathing.

Eventually, Mike pulled back a little and asked, “Was that okay?”

“I don’t exactly have a lot to compare it to,” Will said, but he sounded so absurdly breathless that he probably wasn’t fooling anyone.

“Jeez, thanks,” Mike said with a snort. “Stop it or you’ll make me blush.”

Mike’s cheeks were pretty red already—Will didn’t think he’d ever seen him blush as much as he’d done tonight. He’d also never looked at Mike from so close before. Mike’s hand was still cupping his cheek, their noses barely an inch apart, the intimacy of it overwhelming. It was the weirdest thing, because they’d known each other for years and god knew that Will had studied Mike’s face in great details. The amount of time he spent just looking at Mike was what had clued him in about the nature of his feelings, because he didn’t watch any of his other friends so intently. And yet, despite the deep, well-worn familiarity of each of Mike’s features, Will suddenly felt like he was seeing him for the first time tonight. He’d thought that he knew every frown, every twitch of his mouth, every laugh, every sigh, but the way Mike was looking at him right now was unfamiliar, unsettling and exciting at the same time. 

“Earth to Will?” Mike said. “You’re kind of staring at me.”

“Yeah, well, you’re really close.”

“It’s kind of inevitable when you’re kissing someone.”

Will wanted Mike to kiss him again—no, _he_ wanted to the one be kissing Mike, but once again he couldn’t make himself move. They’d also been ignoring El for—Will didn’t know for exactly how long, but it had felt like a long time and that wouldn’t do. Thinking of El made Will think of something else that hadn’t occurred to him until now.

“Hey, what about El and me?” he asked, pulling away from Mike and looking at El over Mike’s shoulder. “If we’re all dating, then does it mean that we’re boyfriend and girlfriend?”

“Oh.” Mike blinked, like he hadn’t thought about it either, and then looked back at El. “I mean, it’s up to you guys, I guess? I didn’t think that you two—but it feels, I don’t know, selfish if I get to date both of you and you just get me.”

He said that and shrugged, looking like he didn’t understand what a huge deal getting _him_ was to Will. Not that Will really wanted to enlighten him on that point. What they’d shared for the moment—one kiss, the promise of a relationship—was too tenuous for him to betray how bad he had it already. He didn’t want it to get to Mike’s head.

“I don’t know,” he said hesitantly, looking at El over Mike’s shoulder. “El, what do you think?”

As important as she’d become to him since she’d started living with him and his family, Will had never really considered El girlfriend material—to be fair, he didn’t see _any_ girl that way.

“Maybe we can kiss too,” El suggested.

“Oh my god,” Mike whispered, but he seemed to be talking to himself rather than to them. 

“Okay,” Will said. Tonight, everything that would usually sound crazy to him felt par for the course.

El stood up and then sat down on the bed by his side. She smiled at him, sweet and trustful, like it wasn’t a big deal at all for them to kiss with her boyfriend watching. Well, _their_ boyfriend—yeah, it was going to take a while for this to sink in. El leaned in and pressed a soft kiss on Will’s lips. It was over very quickly. Will had instinctively closed his eyes, and when he opened them again he saw El looking back at him with a crooked little smile. 

“So?” Mike asked. “How was it?”

“It was—”

It had been nice. Not awkward, like he’d feared it would be—he was actually surprised at how comfortable it had felt. He could see himself doing it again, but it hadn’t shaken him to his core the way Mike’s kiss had.

“It was different,” he said.

“Yes,” El said, and Will knew they were on the same wavelength. “Different.”

“And… Okay, so what’s it going to be?”

Will and El shared a long look, and Will was hit by a two-year old memory—not a flashback, just a memory dredged up by the circumstances. He remembered lying in the dark, rotten duplicate of Castle Byers in the Upside Down, curled in on himself, so cold and exhausted that sitting up or even opening his eyes was beyond him. He remembered this unfamiliar girl’s voice talking to him, calling him by his name, saying, ‘ _Just hold on a little longer’_ and wrapping warm fingers around his. Any time he remembered that moment, what struck him as strange was that at the time he hadn’t wondered who she was, how she was able to talk to him, or whether he could trust what she was saying. That she was a friend, an ally, was an instinctive truth that his dying mind had simply accepted. It had been over a year before he could meet her for real, and at first she’d been too wrapped up in Mike and too restricted by Hopper’s rules for them to become close, but his first impression of her had never been belied. She was his ally in a struggle that neither of them understood well; they were made of the same cloth, they _got_ each other in a way that no one else really did. To call her a ‘friend’ or a ‘sister’ didn’t quite fit, and although ‘girlfriend’ wasn’t a perfect match either, it would probably make more sense to other people.

“We can be girlfriend and boyfriend,” he said.

“Girlfriend and boyfriend, but different,” El said.

“Yeah, that’s right.” 

For some reason he wanted to laugh again, but this time the urge wasn’t edged with hysteria like before and just stemmed from pure, genuine happiness. He’d been stuck in a dark place for weeks, locked on his own even when there were other people around him, but now he could feel light creeping in, like from a door cracking open—or like El’s voice in the Upside Down, bringing brightness and warmth with it.

“Okay,” said Mike, looking like he was confused but didn’t want to dispute it. “Last question: what are we gonna say to other people? Do we tell the party? Our families? I don’t know, I really don’t see myself telling my parents. Maybe Nancy, but my _parents_ …”

Mike’s question doused a little of Will’s flush of euphoria, reminding him that this was real, and would be confronted to the other real things in his life. “I don’t know. My mom’s just gonna worry. And if she worries about me more than she already does she’s going to give herself a heart attack. I could maybe tell Jonathan but I’d rather wait a little.”

“We tell the party,” El said. “No secrets.”

“Yeah, I also think we should tell them,” Mike said. “It’d be a pain to have to hide it when we all hang out together.”

“Okay,” Will said, “so we tell the party, and then maybe our siblings. As for our parents… we wait until we’re more—until we know what we’re doing.”

“Sounds like a plan,” Mike said. He shuffled around until he was sitting on the floor between Will and El’s legs, with his back against the bed. He took Will’s hand, then El’s, and hung to both, letting out a deep sigh. “I feel, like, happy. It’s a weird feeling.”

“I know what you mean,” Will said. 

He was also completely worn out now that some of the tension had died down, both the good and the bad kind. His eyelids were drooping and he blinked a few times to fight it, because it was something like 9:30 pm and he didn’t want to go to bed early like a little kid. 

“You’re tired,” Mike said.

“I’m okay,” Will protested, but he had to blink again to keep himself alert. “We could maybe try watching the movie again.”

“Are you kidding me? We’re not watching that movie.”

“I’ll be fine! We can fast forward the—that scene, and—”

“Well, _I_ ’m not watching that movie.”

“I’m not watching it either,” El said. “I don’t like the lab.”

“Oh,” Will said, feeling like a jerk for not having thought of it. He wasn’t the only one with bad memories lying in wait. _Not everything is about you_. “Then we could—”

He broke into a yawn so deep it made him tear up. So much for pretending he was still up for anything. Stupid body, the greatest of betrayers.

“Just lie down, Will,” Mike said. He’d gotten on the bed without Will noticing and was now tugging him down. “You need sleep. We’ll stay with you.”

“Yeah?” Will murmured. Fighting Mike was too much effort and he let himself be guided down. At the same time, he saw El clamber on the bed on Mike’s other side.

“Yeah, we’ll be right there with you until you fall asleep.”

After the Upside Down, and then right after the Mind Flayer, his mom had sometimes slept with him at night, for her own comfort as much as for Will’s; but at fourteen, almost fifteen years old, this felt way too infantilizing for Will to allow it again. Having El and Mike there would be different, wouldn’t it? More adult. Accepting to be in a relationship with them meant that he had to let them in a little more than he had before, right?

He was lying on his side, eyes closed, Mike’s arm wrapped around his middle, when he finally said in an exhale, “Yeah, all right.”

He fell asleep so fast that it felt like being sucked into a dark hole, his body sinking down like a stone in water. The dream started to intrude on the peaceful darkness in bits and pieces—the stormy sky, the drifting flakes of ash, the occasional growl. _I’m there again._ His pulse raced, thumping in his ears, his breathing becoming loud and jerky. He simultaneously knew that he was asleep and that he was _there again_ , walking through the dark, twisted version of his hometown. 

_Help. Can you hear me? Can_ anyone _hear me?_

That voice again. “Hopper?”

The dream tore itself apart when Will woke up with a jolt. He bit back on a cry, gripping the front of his t-shirt where he could feel his heart still beating hard. He was in his day clothes, lying over the covers on his bed. The sound of a sigh broke the silence and then Will felt his mattress move, which sent his heart in his throat before he remembered that he’d fallen asleep with Mike and Eleven. He rolled on his other side to check; moonlight rained over a sleeping form that was too small to be Mike, so had to be Eleven. It looked like Mike was gone, probably back home. Will still had the phantom sensation of Mike’s arm around him but it felt like a dream, now, less real than the nightmare he’d just had. 

“El,” Will whispered, shaking her shoulder. “El, wake up.”

She awakened instantly, going from sleeping to perfectly alert in a heartbeat. “Will?” she said, sitting up. She was also wearing the clothes she’d had on during the day, wrinkled from her sleeping in them. “Nightmare?”

“Yeah. Well, actually, I’m not so sure it was a dream at all.”

Somehow, she got his meaning right away. “Hopper?” she said in a small voice. “Did you hear Hop again?”

“I… Maybe? It felt pretty real. I don’t know, I don’t want you to get your hopes up and if it’s really Hopper then I don’t know how I was able to pick up on it.”

“True sight,” El said in a tone of absolute certainty. 

Will contained a sigh, swallowing back the rebuttal he’d already given her. He didn’t like the idea that he might have a direct line to the Upside Down, but if he could help save Hopper—if all the awful things that had happened to him could have one positive consequence, then maybe it was worth exploring.

“Tomorrow we’ll tell Mike. And then we’ll tell the party. If I really heard him—if it wasn’t a dream—then we’ll find a way to save him. I swear it, El. Okay?”

In the semi-darkness he could see her nod, moonlight making her eyes glint like precious gems. Without warning, she threw her arms around his neck and pressed her face against his shoulder.

“Thank you,” she whispered.

“I haven’t done anything yet.”

She held him tighter and he buried his face in her curls, swallowing painfully through the lump in his throat. He really hoped that he wasn’t about to let her down.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A big milestone has been reached on the shippy side of things, so next chapter will be more plotty, although of course the ot3 will remain front and center. :)


	4. Chapter 4

Dustin was woken up on Saturday morning by Mike calling him on the walkie talkie. This wasn’t an unusual occurrence. But since the day an actual monster had kidnapped Will and their lives had become the stuff that movies were made of, Dustin could never hear anyone speak on that walkie without a little spark of adrenaline igniting his body.

It wasn’t as early as Dustin had initially thought—his alarm clock said 10:02—and Mike was only calling for a ‘code yellow.’ This indicated a moderate level of emergency, but early November had meant that shit went down for two years in a row and Dustin felt like it was only fair for him to get a little worried.

“Is there a problem, Mike?” he asked into the walkie, leaning on his elbows in his bed and shaking his head to get his hair out of his eyes. “Over.”

“We’ll explain everything when you get there,” Mike’s tiny voice answered. “There’s… Actually, we have two things to tell you, but one is kind of… It’ll be easier to explain face-to-face. Over.”

“Can you tell me at least if it’s life or death? Should I bring weapons?”

“I said it was a code _yellow_ ,” Mike said. “So, no, you don’t have to bring any weapons. There’s no immediate danger. Over.”

“Okay. Just give me some time to shower and have breakfast. Be there in an hour. Over and out.”

Well, that was odd. Mike had sounded almost embarrassed, although for the life of him Dustin couldn’t figure what it might be about. Also, who was ‘we’? Mike and Eleven? Mike and Will? If Will had gotten another weird vibe, it made sense that he would go to Mike first. With a sigh, Dusting threw his legs out of his bed, but when he tried to get up he stumbled, as Fuzzy, his mom’s new ten-month old cat, slipped between his legs like a furry shadow. Goddamn it, he must have forgotten to close the door to his room during the night. Fuzzy could never resist an open door.

“Stupid cat,” Dustin mumbled under his breath, catching himself on his nightstand and then setting the lamp he’d knocked over back up. 

Once upon a time, he might have yelled at the cat, but remembering their last cat’s fate and how it had sort of been his fault always held him back. This meant that he’d totally become Fuzzy’s bitch, because he was never able to get mad at him. 

“Good thing you’re a cutie,” Dustin said, bending over to give Fuzzy’s head a scratch and earning himself a purr. 

Despite Mike saying that there was no immediate danger, Dustin still got ready as quickly as he could, in and out of the shower in five minutes, wolfing down his breakfast in about ten. He planted a kiss on his mother’s forehead and grabbed his backpack, which was filled with a few useful things, such as snacks and water, a flashlight, a compass, a rope, a survival blanket—Mike had said no to weapons, but it always paid to be ready for everything.

“Watch out for the cat!” his mother shouted after him, so Dustin was careful to check that he had no Fuzzy skulking around his ankles when he closed the front door. 

When he got to Mike’s house he found Will and Eleven already there, and something about the way they whispered to each other told Dustin that the three of them were the ‘we’ that Mike had referred to. His feelings that something was off only increased tenfold, but he didn’t have the time to examine it before Lucas and Max showed up—holding hands, which was a bit uncommon for them since Max wasn’t fond of PDAs. 

Mike, Will and Eleven were all sitting on the couch, making it even more obvious that whatever pieces of news had warranted a party meeting, it was something that concerned the three of them. As he dragged a chair for himself, Dustin observed them covertly. The first thing that struck him as strange was that Will was sitting between Mike and Eleven—the couple usually sat together, and so close that they were practically in each other’s laps. Dustin wondered for a moment if maybe they’d broken up, but then he saw them smile at each other in a way that was a lot more relaxed and affectionate than Dustin would expect of those two right after a break-up. 

“Okay, what’s the code yellow?” Lucas asked. “You said that no weapons were needed, but—”

So Dustin hadn’t been the only one to ask that question, then. That was a relief. 

“No weapons,” Mike said. “We have two unrelated things to tell you. First, uh.”

Mike turned to Will and El, and the three of them hunched over and had about thirty seconds of whispered conversation, of which Dustin could only catch bits and pieces: “—more urgent, I think.” 

“Yes, but—” 

“—get it out of the way first.”

Finally, Mike sighed and straightened up. His hands curled and uncurled and then he wiped them on his pants. He was nervous, Dustin realized—nervous about _them_ rather than worried about some external threat. 

“The first thing we have to tell you is kind of, um.” Mike cleared his throat. “Kind of personal.”

“You and El are getting married,” Dustin said, the joke bursting out of him. Mike’s nerves were contagious and the urge to lighten the mood was a compulsion. 

Mike rolled his eyes, but his hands stopped twitching spasmodically. “ _No_ , we’re not getting married.”

“We can get married?” El asked.

“No, we can’t,” Will told her. “It’s a grown-up thing, you have to be a certain age—but I don’t know exactly how old. And also, it’s only possible for a man and a woman to get married,” he added, which seemed to Dustin a strange specification.

“But what we have to tell you is actually relationship-related,” Mike said.

“Oh, shit,” Max said in a breath. Dustin shot her a look and saw that she had paled. What did Max know? What was going on here?

“I’ve come to a realization about some feelings I had.” Mike’s face had now turned very red, but he plowed on, “I think I’ve had them for a while but I didn’t understand them until recently. So I told El about it, and then Will, because it kind of concerns both of them.”

Mike paused and leaned toward Will, making a grabbing motion with his hand. Will pressed back against the couch, obviously thinking that Mike was reaching for El and trying to clear the way.

“Will, what are you doing?” Mike said in a lower voice.

“Well, I thought you wanted to—”

“I’m trying to hold your hand, you doofus!”

“Oh.”

 _Oh_ , indeed. Dustin, Lucas and Max watched in stunned silence as Mike took Will’s hand in his. Now both of them were blushing and El was grinning, which made no kind of sense at all. 

“Mike?” Dustin said. “What am I looking at? I’m feeling confused.”

“The feelings I was talking about are about Will,” Mike said. “I like Will, and Will likes me, but El and I don’t want to break up so we decided—well, it was El’s idea—anyway, we’re all dating now. The three of us, all together.”

More stunned silence welcomed that declaration. Dustin rewound Mike’s last words in his mind a few times, trying to process them. Mike and Will. Dating. Mike, Will and Eleven. The three of them _together_. It felt like trying to insert a square peg into a round hole; something didn’t quite fit in that scenario. He wasn’t surprised about the ‘Will likes Mike part,’ as he’d suspected as much for a while now. Mike liking Will back was a bit more unexpected, since Mike had always been so intensely into El that Dustin wouldn’t have thought he even looked at anyone else in a romantic light—but it wasn’t _entirely_ unexpected, now that he thought back to some of their interactions. Will and Eleven, now that was more of a puzzle, because, to be perfectly honest, Dustin had assumed that Will didn’t like girls at all. Although, if he had to like _one_ girl, it made sense that it would be Eleven. So, okay, Dustin could make sense of the three pairs, somewhat, but to imagine all of them at once made his brain hurt.

“Will someone please say something?” Mike said tensely after the silence had stretched for a while. 

“Uh, congratulations?” Dustin said.

“Am I the only one finding this weird?” Lucas asked. “I’m not—I mean, I don’t care about the gay thing. I really don’t. But you and Will and Eleven? How is this even going to work?”

“Maybe it’s weird, but our _lives_ are weird,” Mike retorted.

“Not that kind of weird!”

“Why does everyone say that?” Mike cried out, his cheeks now flaming red with anger. “Why does it matter, anyway? Who are we hurting with this?”

“You could be hurting _yourselves_ , for one!” Lucas shouted back, leaning forward in his seat like he was about to jump out of it. “You think I care about what other people think? I care about you three not screwing yourselves over!”

“It hurt already,” Will murmured, which made Mike turn to him with a stricken, guilty expression. Any lingering doubt that Dustin might have about Mike liking Will back evaporated at the amount of raw emotion packed in that one look.

“Are you really okay with this, El?” Max asked. 

“It was my idea,” El said.

“I know, but—” Max said, and then her eyes slid to Mike, as though she was implying that he might have forced his girlfriend into this arrangement. 

Mike got really pale and wide-eyed, like Max had stabbed him in the back and he couldn’t believe she’d done that. When he opened his mouth to reply, Dustin knew that he had to do something before it got ugly. 

“Okay, everyone takes a deep breath,” he said, standing up and placing himself between the two lines his friends had formed, like an idiot walking into a no man’s land.

Mike and Will’s hands were still joined, and El had grabbed Will’s other hand so that the three of them were interlocked, defiant, as though they saw the rest of the party as people that they might have to defend themselves against. Dustin felt the rift splitting the party in two as a physical gap that he was the only one trying to bridge. 

“None of us are judging you, man,” he said to Mike. “We’re just concerned, that’s all.”

“Well, we don’t need—”

“ _But_ , in the end, it’s not really any of our business,” Dustin completed, looking back at Lucas and Max.

“It kind of concerns us, though,” Max said mulishly. “If this goes wrong, we’ll be right in the middle of it.”

“That’s true of any time people date in a friend group,” Dustin told her with a pointed look. 

He didn’t want to draw attention to the fact that he’d had feelings for her too and had gracefully bowed away for the sake of the party’s unity—he was totally over it, now, and didn’t want to make it look like he wasn’t. But from the red spots that bloomed on Max’s cheeks, it looked like his point had come across. 

“True enough, I guess,” she mumbled. 

“Okay, now everyone shakes hands. Mike and Max go first.”

“Do we really have to?” Max said.

“This is tradition.”

To her credit, Max stood up first and went over to Mike. As she shook hands with him, she leaned in and Dustin heard a whispered ‘ _sorry_ ’ coming from her. She shook hands with Will and then with El, the two girls cracking up as they did it. Their laughter lightened the air, so Dustin couldn’t begrudge them their disrespect of the party’s age-old tradition too much. Lucas did the same as Max, with a lot more solemnity. 

His job done, Dustin went back to his own seat. They’d averted that one crisis, at least. It seemed like the older they got, the less easy it was to wrestle everyone’s temperaments, desires and romantic interests into party unity. They’d fought monsters together, though. That had to count for something. 

“Wait,” he said, suddenly remembering something important. “You said you had two things to tell us, Mike. What’s the other thing?”

“The other thing is actually what warranted the code yellow,” Mike said. He’d disentangled his hand from Will’s and adopted a more confident, business-like tone—the kind of tone he used when shit was about to get real. “Will and El—actually, it might be better for them to tell you about it. El?”

“Oh, uh.” El looked a bit flustered as everyone’s attention converged onto her. “Something happened at Halloween. I heard Hopper. On a radio. I tried to find him again, but I couldn’t.”

“So that’s why you wanted to borrow Cerebro,” Dustin said.

“Yes.”

“Are your powers back, then?” Max asked.

“I don’t know,” El said, sounding distinctively frustrated. “I wasn’t sure I hadn’t imagined it, but—”

“But I dreamed about Hopper in the Upside Down,” Will completed. “At first, I thought it was just a nightmare, but I had a dream again last night, and I… It was pretty uneventful, for a nightmare. I was just walking in the Upside Down and then I heard his voice. Hopper’s voice, I mean. Usually my nightmares are more, um. Let’s just say there’s more stuff happening.”

Dustin exchanged uneasy looks with Lucas and Max. If Will shared at all what he saw in his nightmares, it would be with Mike or El—another reason why that three-way dating thing they were going for might not be completely nonsensical. Nevertheless, they all had an inkling of the sort of things he might be dreaming about and none of them liked to think about it.

“Let me play devil’s advocate for a moment,” Dustin said, shaking off his darker thoughts. “How can you be sure that your dream wasn’t influenced by El telling you that she’d heard Hopper on Halloween?”

“My first dream was before Halloween,” Will said.

“But the second one was after.”

Will shrugged in a good-natured concession to Dustin’s point. “I can’t swear to anything. Maybe it was all in my head. But if there’s even a small chance that Hopper is still alive and trapped in the Upside Down, we _have_ to do something.”

“But, wait,” Lucas said, “how could Hopper still be alive after months in the Upside Down? I mean, Will was—” He cut himself off, awkwardly looking over at a Will.

“That _is_ a bit strange,” Will said with an apologetic little smile to Eleven. “It’s very cold there, and the air is, like, toxic or something. I didn’t realize it right away, but after a while it became hard to breathe. But it’s not like I explored the entire place; once my mom started talking to me, I mostly stuck to my house and to Castle Byers. So, who knows, maybe Hopper found some sort of shelter.”

This was the most Will had ever said about his time in the Upside Down, at least where Dustin could hear. It felt like something worth noting, maybe even worth celebrating, but Dustin didn’t want to make Will feel self-conscious about it so he kept the thought to himself. 

“I’ll take you to Cerbero as soon as the rain lets up,” Dustin told El. “I gotta call Suzie anyway, it’s been days since I’ve been able to talk to her.”

“And what if it really _is_ Hopper?” Max asked. “What do we do, then?”

“One day at a time,” Mike said. “First, we confirm Hopper’s presence in the Upside Down. Then we figure out a plan of action.”

—-

It stopped raining the very next day, as though someone up there had been listening to their conversation and had decided to finally turn off the water. Since it was a Sunday, Dustin called El on the walkie and together they trudged up the soggy hill, wrapped in their raincoats in case it started raining again. Eleven was quiet as they walked, so Dustin was quiet too, their silence only broken by the squishy noises their steps made in the soaked grass. Dustin hadn't made the climb in a while and it felt like it went on for-fucking-ever, the effort making him sweat like a pig under his coat's waterproof fabric.

“Here we are,” Dustin murmured, brushing his sweaty curls out of his eyes. “Let me check whether there’s been any damage from the rain and then you can do your thing.”

“Don’t you want to call Suzie first?” Eleven asked.

Dustin _did_ want to call Suzie first, but El’s nervousness was infectious and he could tell that he wouldn’t be able to have a nice, relaxed conversation with his girlfriend while El stood next to him and stared intensely as she waited for her turn.

“Nah, you can go first.” 

When it had started raining, Dustin had gone up the hill to take down Cerebro’s antenna and hide the whole thing under a piece of tarp. He walked over to the bulky tarp-covered shape and called for El, “Help me with this, will you?”

Together, Dustin and El dragged the tarp off Cerebro, and Dustin’s shoes got splashed with the water that had pooled inside the tarp’s folds. They pulled up the antenna, which was harder to do with only two people, and Dustin started checking that everything was in place, adding new duct tape where it looked like the old pieces had slackened.

“You’re okay, baby,” he murmured as he worked. “You’re going to be okay.”

“Baby?” Eleven repeated. “Are you… talking to me?”

“What? Oh, no—god, no. I would have to contend with both Mike _and_ Will if I started calling you pet names. Huh. Isn’t that strange to say it out loud? It sounds strange.”

“Because no one else has two boyfriends,” El said.

“Well, it’s actually not totally unheard of, if you believe what Steve says about high school, but it’s, uh, generally a very different situation from what you three are doing. Hey, it just occurred to me that I’m now the only one dating outside of the party. My girlfriend isn’t even in the same _state_. How unfair is that?”

“I’m sorry,” El said.

She looked so genuinely sorry that Dustin backpedaled immediately—sometimes he forgot that she didn’t always get second degree. “Don’t be sorry, I’m not actually mad! Just kidding. I don’t regret dating Suzie, because she’s the best, and I, uh. I really hope you guys can make it work.”

“Yes,” El said in a soft voice.

Dustin peered at her through the metallic spikes of Cerebro’s antenna as he adjusted it. She was looking toward the town that sprawled beyond the forest, seemingly deep in thoughts. She was a puzzle, most of the time, and it was rare for Dustin to have a clear idea of what was going through her mind, but he wondered whether she was having second thoughts about starting a relationship with both Mike and Will. Yesterday, as they played boardgames in Mike’s basement for the whole afternoon, Dustin had noted that Mike and Eleven were being a lot less handsy with each other than usual—as for Mike and Will, past their initial hand-holding moment, they hadn’t interacted very differently from before. Had they even kissed already? The thought of his two guy friends kissing made Dustin feel a little awkward, but he hoped that Will and Mike weren’t holding back because they were afraid the rest of the party would be assholes about it

“I think my boy got through this shitty weather okay,” Dustin said out loud, patting Cerebro’s board. “I’m good to go. Are you ready?”

“I am,” El said.

Although it pained him to let someone else handle Cerebro, Dustin stepped away so that El could turn the dials herself and find whatever mysterious channel that let her tap into other people. At first, she stared intently at the radio, holding the microphone in her left hand, then she closed her eyes and her breathing slowed and deepened. From Dustin’s end, not much was happening and he got bored pretty quickly. He didn’t remember it taking that much time when they’d used the radio at the AV club to get in touch with Will. Crossing his arms on his chest, he distracted himself by watching the town down below and the tiny cars that crept about the streets like colonies of ants. The grass was too wet to sit down, so when Dustin’s legs got numb from standing still, he started to pace around Cerebro. Crouched in front of the radio, El was so still that she could have been a statue that had sprouted from the ground overnight. 

Static, static, more static. A fading country song so mangled that Dustin couldn’t parse the lyrics. Static again. No Hopper, no coded messages in Russian, no _anything_. Dustin glanced at the sky and saw dark clouds gathering just above the horizon line. Shit, he hoped it wouldn’t start raining before he even got a chance to talk to Suzie. 

“Hey, El,” he risked saying, even though he probably shouldn’t disturb her while she was focusing. “The sky is getting dark again. We might have not long before it—”

“— _day one hundred—I don’t even fucking know anymore—_ ”

“Holy shit!” Dustin exclaimed, dropping to his knees next to El, not caring about the wet grass anymore. El’s eyes were squeezed tightly shut, a trickle of blood running from her nose. Dustin snatched the microphone from her hand and pressed the _talk_ button. “Hey, Hopper? Can you hear me? Hopper! Do you copy? Over.”

“ _What the—who’s that? Who’s here?_ ”

“It’s Dustin! I’m with Eleven and we’re using my radio to talk to you! Holy shit. Holy shit. Will and El were right, you’re really alive. Where are you? Over.”

“ _I don’t—_ ” Scratchy sounds drowned the rest of that sentence. “ _—Dustin? El? El is with you?_ ”

El was shaking, but she kept her eyes closed and didn’t say anything, probably afraid that it would break the connection if she started talking. Dustin rested a comforting hand on her shoulder and said to the radio, “Yeah, I’m with El! Where are you? Are you in the Upside Down? Over.”

“ _Yeah. I think. It’s—_ ” The signal started breaking down and Dustin only got bits of what Hopper was saying. “ _—pocket—below—ver’s lake—monsters don’t—_ "

“What? Hopper? Can you repeat what you said? The signal is breaking down and I didn’t get everything!” Hopper spoke again, but his voice was so distorted that Dustin couldn’t understand a thing. “Hopper? Do you copy? Over. Hopper? Talk to me, man! Hopper? Can you hear me?”

Dustin called Hopper until his voice was hoarse from it. El made a soft whiny sound and slumped against his shoulder, her face ashen and her upper lip coated with blood.

“Shit, El. Are you okay?”

He could swear that his heart had stopped beating and only started up again when El opened her eyes. He’d expected to see her sad, frustrated or angry, but her expression was instead fiercely happy, a joy so strong that it almost made him recoil.

“It worked.” She wiped her nose with the back of her wrist and pulled away from him. “They’re working again.”

“You mean your powers?”

El’s pale face was smeared with blood, making her look like a murder victim, but a new fire burned in her eyes. “I’m not broken,” she said.

“Well, even without your powers, you weren’t—” Dustin started, but stopped at the look El gave him. “Congratulations are in order, I guess.”

“Thanks.”

He stood up and then helped her up. Her hand was so cold that it was uncomfortable to hold it, the chill seeping into his own flesh. “I’m gonna call my girlfriend, and then we’ll summon the party for an emergency meeting. He’s out there somewhere and we’re going to find him.”

“We’re going to find him,” El echoed, but it sounded much more convincing when she said it than when Dustin had. 

—-

It was like a door had opened in her mind. Or rather, like it had cracked open—when Eleven tried moving something with her power again, she hit that frustrating wall, but at least she’d heard _Hopper_ and Dustin could testify to the fact that she hadn’t imagined it. Hopper was alive, he was in the Upside Down, and Eleven had been right all along in thinking that her powers weren’t gone, just slightly out of reach.

The party spent a lot of time rehashing what little Eleven and Dustin had been able to get from Hopper. Obviously, he’d found a place to hide where the monsters couldn’t reach him. He’d mention a ‘pocket’, which Dustin had theorized was some sort of pocket dimension within the Upside Down that sheltered him from the worst of it, like the cold and the poisoned air. Dustin’s explanations had come with an assortment of long, complicated words that Eleven didn’t know, but she cared little about the details. What mattered was that Hopper could still be saved, and she trusted the boys to come up with a way to explain it.

The second question was of Hopper’s exact location in the Upside Down. Will was the first to understand the relevance of Hopper’s mention of a lake.

“When the Mind Flayer was stretching his vines throughout Hawkins,” he said, “he avoided all bodies of water. Remember my drawings? The vines couldn’t go over water. So it would make sense that Hopper’s hiding place would involve water.”

“So he’s… near a lake? _In_ a lake? How’s that possible?” Lucas said.

“Things don’t work in the Upside Down the way they do in our world,” Will said.

“What lake could it be?” Mike asked. “Lake Jordan?”

Dustin snapped his fingers. “Lover’s Lake! That’s what it sounded like. Lover’s Lake is my best guess.”

Where their brainstorming met a hurdle was when it came to deciding how they should save Hopper. Mike was adamant that they needed to confirm his position first, but even that part wasn’t so easy. Mike, Lucas and Dustin spent a long time discussing the possibility of making a very small opening into the Upside Down and then sending in a robot with a camera on it, but Will shot down that idea by saying that technology was faulty in the Upside Down. No one ever mentioned what seemed to Eleven like the obvious way to go, which was to make use of her powers. They might have been waiting for her to suggest it first, but she held her tongue until she had a moment alone with Will to talk about it. 

The moment came that evening, when both of them were in Will’s room. Will was drawing on his bed and Eleven was sprawled on the floor, on her belly, kicking up her feet. She was supposed to be doing the Math homework that Jonathan had given her, but in truth she hadn’t been thinking about it in over ten minutes. Instead, she’d been mulling over her idea and how she could breach the topic with Will. He wasn’t going to like what she had to say, that was certain. The question was how much Eleven was willing to ask of him for Hopper’s sake.

“Hey, Will,” she said.

“Hmm?” 

He rose his head from his drawing; from Eleven’s spot on the floor, she could only see that there was a lot of black, blue and purple in it, which meant he was drawing either the Mind Flayer or the Upside down. This made Eleven feel even worse about what she was about to tell him and she almost didn’t go through with it. She took a breath, held it in for a few seconds, then released it slowly. 

“The night after you disappeared, when I escaped from the lab,” she said, then paused. He visibly stiffened at the topic but gave her a tiny nod, a silent permission to go on. “As I was running through the woods, I saw you.”

“You… what? You mean you saw me when I was attacked by the demogorgon?”

“No, later. The next day. You were in the Upside Down. Then I recognized you on a picture in Mike’s bedroom. I didn’t understand much of what was happening, but I could tell how important you were to Mike. He wanted so badly to find you.”

“Oh.” 

Will rubbed the back of his neck, looking embarrassed and pleased at the same time. It had felt weird, when Mike had first confessed to her that he loved Will, a mix of uncertainty and fear over what it meant for their relationship, and then it had made sense. The situation was different from when Hopper had kept her separated from Mike and she’d crept in the hallways of Hawkins Middle School, catching him talking to a girl she didn’t know— _Max_ , but at the time she hadn’t known and loved Max the way she did now and the sight had made her feel sick, confused and angry for reasons she didn’t understand. She knew and loved Will already, and also knew that Mike loved her. That knowledge made all the difference.

“But, wait,” Will said. “You _saw_ me when I was in the Upside Down? You could see into the Upside Down?”

“Just a peek.” Eleven sat up and crossed her leg, pushing back her Math homework with her foot. “I know I can do it again. I can _travel_ there with my mind, using the dark place. But I think I need… something. An anchor, to keep me there so I can look around and see where Hopper is. A connection to the Upside Down.”

When Will paled, she knew that he got where she was going with this. She never needed to use a lot of words to make Will understand her. He shoved his drawing and pencils off his lap, then threw his legs out of the bed, turning away from her. Hunched over with his elbows on his knees, his breathing ragged and too loud, he started muttering, “Shit, shit, oh, _shit_.”

“Will?” Eleven called timidly.

She’d known that he would freak out and had said it anyway. Her first instinct was to take it back, say that he didn’t have to do it, that it was a bad idea anyway, but this was about saving Hopper and she couldn’t make herself say the words. 

“Do you really think this would work?” he asked. She couldn’t see his face but his voice sounded muffled, like he’d covered his mouth with his hands.

“Yes,” she said. This wasn’t a lie, or even a hopeful estimation. She used to get these flashes of insight all the time when she was younger, these sudden moment of crystal-clear certainty; it had been a while, but she could tell it was one of them.

He exhaled through his mouth a few times, as though trying to get his breathing back under control, and then straightened up, his shoulders so tense they were almost up to his ears. When he turned his face toward her, she saw that his eyes were red and his eyelashes wet, glistening in the electric light, although there were no tear stains on his cheeks.

“Can you do it?” she asked.

“I hope so,” he said. “I don’t _want_ to. I hate this, El.”

“I know.”

“But I made you a promise. I want to be useful. I’m tired of—” He waved his hand broadly, so that the gesture encompassed himself, the drawing on his bed and the ones on his walls. “So, okay. I’ll do it.”

Eleven opened her mouth to thank him, but words didn’t do justice to how grateful she was, knowing just how much this would cost him. She climbed on the bed with him and hugged him from behind, pressing her face against the back of his neck. He smelled sour, like fear, and his neck was slick with sweat.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered. 

He grabbed her joined hands with one of his and clutched them hard. “It’s okay,” he said, although his voice was quivering. “We’ll be together, at least. I don’t think I could do this without you.”

“Together, yes,” she said, hugging him more tightly. 

“Mike is so going to freak out.”

She huffed a little laugh against his skin, not so much because the idea of Mike freaking out was funny in itself, but because there was something comforting about it. Part of it was the predictability of his reaction, and the tingly sort of pleasure she got out of being able to tell in advance how someone would react. The other part was that she knew Mike freaking out would come from a place of love and worry, and the novelty of someone feeling that way about her had yet to wear off. 

“Poor Mike,” she said, and for some reason it made both of them burst out laughing. 

—-

As predicted, Mike freaked out. They held an emergency party meeting in Mike’s basement after the others had come back from school, and Eleven’s suggestion had Mike immediately jumping out of the couch.

“You want to mind-walk in the Upside Down? That’s _insane_. What if the Mind Flayer can feel you there? He wanted to _kill_ you this summer. He’s not going to let you get away this time.”

Having expected his reaction, Eleven had already thought of what to reply. “I won’t be there for real. If the Mind Flayer comes, I can snap back to my body.”

“And you’re sure he can’t stop you from doing that? What if he can—I don’t know, snatch your soul or something? Keep you from going back to your body?”

“Hey, I’d like to object to the concept of ‘soul’ being used here,” Dustin said. “It’s a very nebulous idea that—”

“He can’t do that,” Eleven said, although she was only 90% sure that she was right. The idea of her mind being split apart from her body had shivers running down her spine, but she resolutely pushed it at the back of her mind. There was no room for doubt if she wanted to save Hopper.

“What if he _could_ , though?” Mike insisted, because he could be stubborn like that.

“Hey,” Max said, “why don’t you cool it down, Wheeler? If El says she can handle it, then she can. How about you trust her, for a change?”

“It’s not that I don’t trust her! But come on, we barely know anything about the Upside Down—why am I the only one thinking that El waltzing in there, even just in mind, could be really dangerous? Will said it—nothing there works like in our world, and there’s a mind-controlling monster in it that wants to kill her!”

“Do you have a better idea, then? Or are you just being a dickhead for the sake of it?”

“Oh, so I’m a dickhead just because I worry about my girlfriend?”

Max and Mike were now both standing, facing each other, having forgotten everyone else in the heat of their arguments. Max made up for being several inches smaller than Mike by tipping up her chin and squaring her shoulders. She looked like she was about to get into a fist fight, though Eleven knew she wouldn't physically fight Mike—or she was pretty sure of it, at least.

“No,” Max said, “you’re a dickhead because you’re behaving like an overbearing father! If El wants to go to the Upside Down, then she’ll go to the Upside Down. What’s it to you?”

“It’s not exactly a trip to the mall! It’s—”

“Let her do—”

“Hey, I’m _here_ ,” Eleven said, finally getting tired with the argument. 

She knew they both meant well, but it sometimes felt like arguing with each other was a sport to Mike and Max, and that she was only a pretext. To their credit, they both stopped fighting immediately and looked back at her with apologetic expressions.

“Sorry, El,” Max said. “But he’s so—”

“ _Max_.”

“I do trust you, El,” Mike said. “And I know I can’t keep you from doing anything. But I—” He gave a sweeping group to the rest of their friends. “Can I have a word with you? Like, just you and me?”

“What, you think you have more chance of convincing her if you get her on her own?” Max said.

“Fuck you, Max,” Mike said. “I’m not going to brainwash her, Jesus!”

Lucas looped an arm around Max’s shoulder. “Come on, let’s give them some privacy. Hey, come on.”

With a last glare to Mike, Max let her boyfriend stir her toward the other side of the basement, where the rest of the party pretended to talk among themselves to give Mike and Eleven some space. The basement wasn’t really big enough that they wouldn’t be able to hear at least part of the conversation, but the illusion of privacy was apparently enough for Mike, who turned to Eleven and took her hands.

“I just wanted to tell you this,” he said in a whisper. “You know you don’t _have_ to do it, right? We can always try sending in a camera like we talked about.”

“Will said it wouldn’t work.”

“Will said it wouldn’t work _well_. If we have to try several times before it works, then we’ll do it as many times as it takes. It’s just—I don’t want you to think that this all rests on your shoulders.” He reached out to tuck a lock of hair behind her ears and she leaned her cheek into his hand. “You don’t always have to be the one who saves everyone else. We can help. That’s what belonging to a party means—you don’t ever have to do things on your own.”

Eleven had known that Mike would object, but she had _not_ guarded herself against him saying that kind of thing. With the lump that had grown in her throat, it took her a moment to be able to reply, “I know. But I won’t be on my own. Will is doing this with me—he will anchor me to the Upside Down.”

Mike blanched. “What?” he said weakly. He whipped around. “Will?”

From the other side of the basement, where he’d obviously been listening to them, Will said, “I already agreed to it.”

“I’m not trying to talk you— _hell_ , I didn’t know I’d have to talk you out of it. Are you sure?”

“I can do it,” Will said fiercely, although his face was deathly pale. “A camera won’t work in the Upside Down. It’s the only way, Mike.”

“I need to sit down,” Mike mumbled, then walked over to the couch and plopped down on it, grabbing his head in his hands.

The rest of the party clustered around him. “Dude, stop making it about you,” Max said, although she didn’t sound as harsh as her words. “Will and El will be fine. You’re such a drama queen.”

Surprisingly, Mike didn’t blow up at the provocation. “You’re right,” he said with a sigh. “If you two are sure about this, then it doesn’t matter what _I_ think.”

“So,” Dustin said, “are we going to do this, like, now?”

“Uh,” Will said.

Mike looked at Dustin, alarmed. “ _Now?_ Shouldn’t they take time to prepare or whatever?”

“Prepare how?” Lucas said. “This _is_ preparation for the bigger mission. They’re doing reconnaissance. If we’re going to save Hopper, we shouldn’t waste any time.”

Eleven agreed, but she was waiting for Will to say something. She looked at him and he pinched his mouth. “Let’s do it now,” he said. “Before I lose my nerves.”

“Wow, okay,” Mike said. “Right now. We’re doing this now. Okay.” He stood up like a shot and started pacing. “So, how is it going to work? What do you need?”

“Like when I access the dark place,” Eleven said. “We need blindfolds, some white noise.”

“Blindfolds?” Will asked. “Me too?”

“It’s better. Helps us focus.”

Doing preparation work helped distract everyone. Mike got a radio from his sister’s room and the others brought scarves to use as blindfolds. Eleven sat down crossed-legged on the threadbare rug that covered the cement floor and gestured for Will to do the same and sit down facing her. The others were all staring, the weight of their gazes like a burn on Eleven’s face. Mike’s foot tapped on the floor incessantly.

“Are you ready?” Eleven asked Will.

He held an orange woolen scarf in his hands like he wasn’t sure what to do with it and looked about to throw up. “I don’t know if ‘ready’ is the word I would use,” he said with a wobbly smile.

“Wait,” Mike said and then bent over, grabbing Eleven’s face and kissing her on the mouth. “Good luck.”

He turned to Will and Eleven expected him to kiss Will too, but he paused, his face close to Will’s, wavered for a moment and then put an arm around Will’s neck to give him a quick hug. It seemed strange to Eleven, but this wasn’t the right moment to think about it. She had, as she’d once heard Joyce say, ‘bigger fish to fry.’

She closed her eyes and tied her scarf around her head, plunging herself in darkness. Mike had started pacing again and she could hear the _stomp stomp_ of his feet as he strode across the room, then a sharp intake of breath as he almost said something before he thought better of it. Even though she couldn’t see him, his nervousness was getting to Eleven and she knew that it must be the same for Will, whose breathing she could hear quickening. With a sigh, she tugged her blindfold down.

“Mike,” she said. “You’re distracting us.”

Mike stopped biting on his thumbnail to say, “Oh, sorry. I’ll just—I’ll sit quietly over there.”

“Or we could get you out of here,” Lucas said, putting his hands on Mike’s shoulders. 

“I don’t want to go,” Mike protested, fighting Lucas’ attempt to drag him away. “What if something goes wrong? Someone has to be there in case they need help.”

“I’ll stay,” Max said. “I can be quiet. You guys get him out of here, he’ll drive El and Will crazy.”

“Hey, I’m right _here_ ,” Mike said. “Don’t talk about me like I’m not in the room!”

Lucas and Dustin teamed up against him, pushing and pulling until Mike stopped resisting them and willingly climbed the steps to the first floor. Eleven turned to Will, aware of Max sitting down on the couch in her periphery, but not paying close attention to what she was doing. 

“Let’s try something different,” Eleven said. “We’re going to hold hands so that we can still feel each other, and you’ll follow my lead. You’ll breathe when I do. Okay?”

Will nodded mutedly, still blindfolded. He was keeping it wonderfully together, but she could tell he was terrified at the white-knuckled grip he had on his knees. Eleven shuffled closer so he was within reach and then put her blindfold back on. She fumbled a little to find Will’s hands but clasped them hard once she had a hold on them. His palms were cold and clammy, so to try and make him relax, Eleven started to draw small circles on the back of his hands with her thumbs, like Mike did when he wanted to soothe her. 

“Now breathe with me,” she said. “One breath in.” She took a long, dragged-out breath. “One breath out.”

They breathed together for a long moment, until Will’s breathing stopped hitching and they were in perfect unison. True to her word, Max was almost completely silent and Eleven’s ears were filled with the white noise from Nancy’s radio. The noise drowned all background sounds, all of Eleven’s thoughts, until the only thing she was aware of was Will’s hands in hers. She opened her eyes to complete darkness, except for Will standing by her side and holding her hand. 

“It worked,” Eleven said in a breath, overcome with bone-melting relief. She hadn’t liked that place when she was younger, had found it terrifying, but it was now a welcome sight.

“Wow,” Will said, sweeping glance at the dark nothing around them. He took one step and looked down when it made a splashing sound. “Is it what you call the dark place?”

“Yes. We should be able find Hopper here.”

“It feels familiar,” Will said with a thoughtful frown. “I feel like I’ve been here before. When you talked to me in the Upside Down? I don’t know, I was kind of out of it at the time.”

“You saw it?” Eleven asked. “No one but me ever sees it. They’re generally not even aware of me.”

But Will had been aware of her, even half-unconscious. He’d replied to her, which no one had ever done. Her mother had known she was there and communicated in her own way, but this had been a special situation. Same with Billy seeing her when he was possessed by the Mind Flayer. Had Will always had some sort of latent ability, or had he already been changed by his stay in the Upside Down by the time Eleven talked to him? 

“No one?” Will asked uneasily. “Are you sure? Maybe it was because I was in the Upside Down. Maybe it’s that place.”

“Well, if this is the case,” Eleven said, “then we’ll be able to talk to Hopper and he’ll tell us where he is. That’ll make things easier for us.”

“Yeah,” Will said. “You probably didn’t even need me.”

“Maybe not.” She gave his hand a squeeze. “But I’m glad you’re here. Let’s find Hopper, now. We should be able to see him.”

She had barely said the words before she could see him, at first just as a small huddled form in the distance. In the blink of an eye, he was right there with them, or maybe they were right there with him. He wore a tattered uniform, probably the Russian uniform he’d stolen to infiltrate the base, and was sitting with his arms wrapped around his knees. His face was gray and he looked exhausted, but he wasn’t blue from the cold like Will had been when Eleven had seen him in the Upside Down, even though he’d been there for a lot longer. This confirmed Dustin’s theory that Hopper had found a place where he was protected from the worst of the Upside Down’s toxic atmosphere, and that he only owed his survival to this.

He was muttering under his breath, “Dustin? Can you hear me? Eleven? Anyone? Can you hear me?”

“Hopper!” Eleven shouted. “Hop, I’m here!” He kept mumbling and Eleven let go of Will’s hand to kneel down by Hopper’s side. “I’m right here. Hop, can you hear me? I’m right next to you.”

He didn’t reply to her, didn’t even look in her direction, only kept muttering never-ending pleas to be heard. It broke Eleven’s heart in halves and filled her eyes with tears. She was right _there_ and he couldn’t even see her. She couldn’t ask him where he was or reassure him that they were going to come and get him. He was probably wondering if he’d imagined Dustin talking to him. Even if he physically looked more okay than she’d expected, she knew how extreme solitude took its toll on you and she hated that he’d had to go through this because she had been too weak to save him sooner. 

She sniffed and wiped her eyes, then turned to Will. “He can’t see or hear me. Not like you could, Will.”

“I don’t get it,” Will said, looking ill-at-ease. 

“We need to see where he is.”

“I don’t know how to do that.”

She stood up, turning her back on Hopper and his mad mumblings, and took Will’s hands again. “Close your eyes,” she instructed, “and think about the Upside Down.”

He opened his mouth as if to object but then cast a look over Eleven’s shoulder to where Hopper was sitting. His teeth clicked as he shut his mouth and he closed his eyes. 

“Picture it in your mind,” Eleven went on. “The way it looks, the way it feels, the sounds you can hear.” She felt his fingernails bite into the back of her hands. “It’s all right. I’m with you and you’re not really there. Nothing bad can happen to you. _I_ ’m not letting anything bad happen to you.”

The blackness around them dissolved slowly, giving way to shimmering greyness, like paint running down a wall. Hopper was still at their feet, but instead of black water the ground was now made of slate-gray stone, or at least what looked like stone. With a frown, she gave another look to the shimmering that was all around them and over their heads. This didn’t look like the Upside Down she remembered from the brief time she’d had there. It rather looked like—

“Water,” Will said. “It’s like we’re under water.”

It did look like that, like when Papa had plunged Eleven in the bath, except that she could breathe and couldn’t feel the wetness and the pressure of the water on her body. It was like they were surrounded with phantom water, the dark, ghostly memory of what water had once been.

“We’re _inside_ the lake,” Will said excitedly. “That’s why the monsters can’t get to Hopper there!”

“We have to make sure that this is really Lover’s Lake,” Eleven said. 

Will’s face fell, but he didn’t try to pretend they didn’t have to do it. “How can we get up there? I can’t see anything we could use to climb. Maybe if we walk we can get to the edge of the lake.”

Eleven lifted her hand and traced an invisible line at eye-level—it left a darker, ephemeral trail in the shimmers but she couldn’t feel water pressing back against her hand. This felt more like mist than water. No way they could swim up to the surface like they would have done in their world’s equivalent. 

“How big is the lake?” Eleven asked.

“Not super big, although it’d still be a bit of a walk if we’re in the middle of it. But unless Hopper has been thrown here directly from the explosion in the Russian lab, he must have lowered himself from the shore of the lake and then I doubt he’s gone very far.”

Eleven looked again at Hopper, who gave no indication that he was aware of their presence. She hated to walk away from him, but they were less than ghosts to him, unable to give him any comfort, and they still had a mission to fulfill— _reconnaissance_ , Lucas had called it. Eleven had heard that word before during some of their D&D games and she knew it meant that Will and her were doing essential work to prepare for the big rescue mission. They needed to make sure that Hopper really was inside Lover’s Lake. 

“We’ll be back soon,” she whispered to Hopper’s ear and then pressed a kiss on his forehead. 

As she was turning around, she caught his startled reaction and stopped to observe him. Had he felt the kiss? Did he know she was there? His eyes were more alert than before and he’d stopped mumbling. 

“Hop?” she said hopefully, but all he did was rub his face and say, “I’m going crazy.”

“Come on,” Will said, tugging at her elbow. “We’ll come back for him.”

They had to pick a direction and trust that their instinct wasn’t directing them toward the middle of the lake rather than the shore, but Eleven felt pretty confident about it and Will seemed to have the same hunch. They walked for about ten minutes, hand in hand, before they came in sight of a huge black wall. The shimmering from the lake’s not-water made Eleven a little dizzy, so when she saw the black wall she started to walk faster, eager to get out of it. When they got closer, they saw that the wall wasn’t actually a wall, but more like a steep slope, which allowed them to climb up without much difficulty. They cautiously breached the surface of the not-water, just enough to get a peek of what was outside. They saw that they were clinging to the side of a grassy shore bordered with dark trees that oozed with a sticky-looking liquid. A wooden pontoon stretched over the shimmering water slightly on their right, its planks rotten and covered with thick black vines. The sky was rolling with stormy clouds and greyish flakes drizzled from it. Everything was quiet, stiflingly silent, except for the growl of thunder in the distance. Maybe it was only her imagination, but Eleven immediately found it more difficult to breathe. 

“Is this Lover’s Lake?” Eleven asked Will in a whisper, afraid that the Mind Flayer was lurking around here and would be able to somehow hear her. 

“Yeah,” Will answered in the same tone. He must have had the same thought, because sweat pearled on his forehead and his fingers kept squeezing Eleven’s in brief spasms. “We can’t really see it from here, but the lake is heart-shaped, which is why it’s called Lover’s Lake. And couples come here to hang out and stuff.” 

Even in the dim lighting of the Upside Down, Eleven could see Will’s cheeks darken. If this was supposed to be a romantic place, then she and Mike should come here since a year had past and she was now allowed to go out as much as she wanted—no, she and Mike and _Will_ should come here. Shaking her head, she forced herself to come back to their present concerns; it was selfish to be thinking of romantic dates when she should be focusing on saving Hopper. 

“We need to get back now,” she said. A shriek echoed from the woods, making the hair on Eleven’s arms stand—the cry of a demogorgon was unmistakable. “Right _now_.”

“Yes,” Will said, clutching her hands. “How—what should I do? How do we get back? How—”

“Close your eyes.”

“El, it’s _coming_.”

“We’re not really there. It can’t hurt us. Close your eyes.”

He did it, but she could tell that it was entirely out of deep, bottomless faith in her. She closed her eyes too and pictured the Wheelers’ basement in her mind, the way the rug felt under her butt, Will’s D&D drawings on the walls, the sounds of Max’s quiet breathing. Suddenly she could feel her body again, her hands cramping from how hard she gripped Will’s, her legs numb from holding the position for so long. She could feel familiar warm stickiness on her upper lip; when she ripped her blindfold off her face and rubbed a finger under her nose, the finger came out bloody. 

In front of her, Will was also bleeding from his nose. “Shit,” he said when he realized it. He wiped his nose and then looked at the blood on his hand with a mix of puzzlement, horror and dismay. “El?” he said in a small voice.

“It’s okay,” she said. 

“Does that mean I’m—like you?” He didn’t sound overjoyed at the prospect, not that she could blame him. 

“Maybe not like me, exactly,” she said. “But you’re something. Something _more_.” 

She wanted to make it sound like a good thing, something to get excited about, because Will had suffered enough and she didn’t want to add even a drop of pain to his burden. Will didn’t look convinced, but this was to be a conversation for another time, because Max chose that moment to remind them that she was there too.

“How did it go?” she asked. 

She was sitting on the edge of the couch, looking like she was about to bolt from it, and her fingers were wrung together. She might have made fun of Mike for being anxious, but it seemed like she’d found the wait nerve-wracking too, which made Eleven wonder just how long they’d been gone.

“We found Hopper,” Eleven said. “He’s in Lover’s Lake.”

“ _In_ the lake?”

“Yeah. Go get the others so I can explain it to everyone.”


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Things get a little heated between Will and Mike in this chapter, though it doesn't go very far. A warning or an enticement, depending on your tastes.

Mike had let himself be dragged out of the basement, but he refused to be moved from the door and just spent the next twenty minutes pacing in front of it, hands in his pockets so he wouldn’t bite his nails again. He didn’t need to be looking in Dustin and Lucas’ directions to know that they were rolling their eyes at him. They probably thought he was being dramatic. Or a control freak, which he frequently got accused of being—and okay, in all fairness, the accusation wasn’t totally unfounded. Sue him, but he liked having a hand in whatever was happening so he could make sure things were going okay; and he hated, _hated_ being left waiting with no way to help. 

His current anxiety wasn’t just about having to wait on the sidelines, though. He wasn’t just being a control freak. He’d been sucked into a spiral of memories and couldn’t get out of it. 

_Goodbye, Mike._

El’s face, bloodied, exhausted, as she said goodbye to him before her last showdown with the demogorgon, flashed in front of his mind’s eye. So tiny in front of that horrifying monster, so brave. He thought again about all those days—almost an entire _year_ —of calling her on the walkie talkie, barely daring to hope that she was still alive but unable to give up on the idea at the same time. It had eaten him up, and he knew he’d been a shit to his family and friends during that time, and kind of after El had come back too. That acute, unbearable feeling of _loss_ , mostly new to him, had left him with no energy for anything else. After El had returned, he’d felt like he could never see enough of her to soothe that hurt, and even now he had the feeling that it had left a permanently scabbing mark on his heart.

That train of thoughts led to more terrible memories, and as he paced and paced, his fists clenched inside his pockets, he thought of Hopper showing up at school to tell them Will had gone missing, of holding a haggard Will’s hand while wracking his brains to find something comforting to say, of watching, helpless, as Will fell to the ground and started screaming in pain. Why did he keep falling in love with people he had to watch be put through the wringer? Was it just bad luck or was there, perversely, something about it that he found attractive? The thought made him feel queasy—was he _that_ horrible? He wanted Will and El to be happy, didn’t he? He liked seeing them smiling and enjoying themselves, and if there were anything at all that he could do to take away from their burden, he would—

“Mike? What are you doing?”

Mike stopped his pacing and looked at his sister, his mind very slowly trying to process her question. What was he doing? He was doing _nothing_ , was the problem. He was doing nothing at all while the two people he loved most were risking themselves. 

“Uh,” he said, all of his eloquence gone to the window. 

Nancy had obviously just left the bathroom and was holding her still slightly damp hands on front of her so the air would finish drying them. The expression on her face, at first concerned in a puzzled way, was now morphing into a more suspicious one. She looked from her brother to Lucas and Dustin, who were very obviously trying hard to look casual.

“What’s going on?” she asked, then tilted her head so she could peer over Mike’s shoulder. “Where are Will, El and Max?”

“Oh, they’re—“ Mike started to say.

“—couldn’t make it,” Lucas said.

“—aren’t there yet,” Dustin said.

“I saw Will and El come in two hours ago,” Nancy said, looking more unimpressed by the second. “We were just finishing breakfast. Mom offered to make more pancakes for them.”

Mike did a mental face-palm. _This_ was why they should let him do the talking unless they’d agreed beforehand on a cover story! Amateur mistake. Before he could come up with anything to tell his sister that would make them look less like they were up to something, Max flung the basement door open and said, “Hey, guys, they’re—” 

She cut herself off when she saw Nancy. They hadn’t said anything about hiding what they were doing from Nancy, but Max was quick to read the mood and decide she should err on the side of caution. “Hey, Nancy,” she said. “Were we making too much noise? We’re playing this game where—”

Mike would have kissed her for her fast thinking, but his sister was unfortunately not so easily fooled. “What’s in the basement?” she said, then shoved past Max and down the wooden staircase.

They all followed her, and Mike tried to tell himself that he really shouldn’t worry, because if El and Will were back from their mind-walk in the Upside Down there was nothing incriminating for Nancy to see. Once he got down there, though, he saw that both Will and El’s upper lips were smeared with red, like they’d had a nosebleed. It was a familiar sight on El, although Mike had never liked it because it made him think of brain damage and other fun stuff, but to see Will bleeding too made his heart lurch in his chest. It carried a whole load of implications that he knew Will wasn’t at all comfortable with.

Nancy knew what the meaning of the nosebleed was too. “El?” she said. “Are your powers back? But… Will, what happened to _you_?”

Will and El looked none the worse for wear, except for the nosebleeds, but a trip to the Upside Down was never fun and Mike wanted nothing more than to run to them and hold them. But Nancy was there, and he knew she would notice it if he acted with Will differently from usual. He still wanted to tell his sister about their relationship, but he wanted to do it like he’d done with the party, to sit her down and explain the situation to her calmly and rationally so she would see that it was a grown-up decision and not a stupid childish fantasy. And he couldn’t go to El and not to Will, because he still felt guilty that he had kissed El earlier but had not been able to bring himself to kiss Will in front of the others. Will was going to think that Mike didn’t love him as much as he loved El, or that he was embarrassed about the gay stuff—which was so not true. It was just a little weird, still something he had to adjust to. 

“I’m okay,” Will said, inefficiently trying to rub the blood off his upper lip with the heel of his palm. 

“What were you doing?” Nancy asked. She’d crossed her arms and used her stern, big-sister voice, the one that Mike tended to roll his eyes at but that he knew meant business.

A series of quick glances was exchanged by the party. Mike wasn’t strictly-speaking against telling his sister about what they were doing—if he’d learned one thing those past two years, it was that having Nancy by your side when shit went down was good—but he knew that Will was afraid that if they told Nancy or Jonathan, their older siblings would insist that they also tell Joyce about it. 

“She will charge into the Upside Down by herself,” Will had said. “She won’t let any of us help.”

He was probably right. Joyce was first and foremost a mom, and since she was the only one of their parents to know about all the supernatural shit that had happened in Hawkins, she always felt like she was their parent by default in that sort of situation. Mike was uneasy with the idea of he or any of his friends charging into the Upside Down but at least they would face this as a group. 

“Well?” Nancy insisted, raising her eyebrows in her I-will-tell-on-you expression, although she must have known that whatever was happening wasn’t something she could tell their parents about. 

“We were just—” Mike said, with no idea on how he was going to finish that sentence.

“Hopper is alive,” El said, her voice loud and clear like a bell ring.

Nancy dropped her arms. “What?” she said. “But Joyce said—how do you _know_ that?”

Mike sighed inwardly, but at this point he knew it was better to tell his sister the whole truth. He hadn’t prepared a good lie and she wouldn’t be fooled by a half-hearted one. She was too smart and had seen too much. 

“He’s in the Upside Down,” he said. “At Lover’s Lake.”

“ _In_ Lover’s Lake,” Will said. 

“Wait, I don’t—” Nancy started, but Mike raised a hand to stop her incoming question. 

“We’ll explain everything,” he said, “but first, you have to promise not to tell Joyce Byers.”

“I can’t promise that. If what you say is true, we can’t hide it from Joyce.”

“We can save Hopper,” Will said. His face was set into a pale, deadened mask that Mike knew meant he was freaking out in the inside. “We’re the only ones that can. But Mom won’t let us do it—she’ll think that she has to protect me and El from what we have to do and Hopper _will die_. Please, Nancy. We can tell whoever else you want—my brother, Steve, I don’t know, maybe Robin too. But not my mom.”

He held Nancy’s eyes for a long moment until she visibly caved. Mike was impressed, because he’d lost any of the staring contests he’d ever done with his sister. But he was familiar with that look that Will got sometimes, that El had too, an almost adult look of having weathered unimaginable trials and come out on the other side still fighting, and he knew how effective it could be. 

“All right,” Nancy said with obvious reluctance. “But I want you to tell me _everything_.”

—-

Mike let the others tell Nancy how they’d come to the realization that Hopper was still alive and had pinpointed his location, because he needed to think. There were two things at war in his mind, two opposite pulls that threatened to tear him apart: what he wanted, and what needed to be done. By the time El and Will had finished telling everyone what they’d seen in the Upside Down, Mike had integrated their tale to the parameters of his plan and come to a conclusion. 

“So now we just need to go fetch Hopper in the Upside Down,” Dustin said. “Easy peasy.”

“Wait,” Nancy said with a frown. “We went through so much trouble closing the gate to the Upside Down— _twice_. Opening another one sounds like a _terrible_ idea.”

“Not a gate,” Mike said. “A breach.”

Nancy shot him a sharp, inquisitive look. She knew he had a plan in mind and was getting ready to object it—but that was okay, because he hadn’t expected any different. He loved his sister, he really did, and he had absolutely no doubt that she loved him too, but they’d never had the kind of mellow, mutually supportive bond that Will and Jonathan shared. They were too similar, both of them too fond of getting their way, which meant that they clashed more often than not. 

So it wasn’t a surprise when Nancy repeated what he’d said with a fair amount of skepticism. “A breach? Oh, that’s okay, then. Because we’re absolutely sure that no monster will come out of that breach, right?”

“We’ll be guarding the breach to make sure that they don’t come out.”

“This is a terrible idea, Mike. We don’t want any more invasion from the Upside Down into Hawkins. Haven’t you learned anything from the past two years? We can’t let anything like that happen again. This time it wouldn’t be the government or the Russians’ fault—it would be _us_. Our responsibility if anyone gets killed or hurt by those monsters again. What if the—what do you call it again—right, the _Mind Flayer_. What if the Mind Flayer manages to infiltrate Hawkins again?”

“It won’t,” El said. “Because I will be in the Upside Down looking for Hopper, and it’s going to get the Mind Flayer’s attention.”

“You’ll be going in _alone_?” Nancy said, eyebrows shooting up almost to her hairline.

“Yes,” El said.

“No,” Max said, “No way. We’re coming with you.”

“Mike said it, the breach needs to be guarded,” El said. “A group needs to guard it, because we don’t know how many monsters might try to come out.”

“Then we split the party! Some guard the breach, and some go with you get Hopper.”

“Nothing good ever comes out of splitting the party,” Lucas said, then withered when Max glared daggers at him. 

“Mike, say something,” Max said, turning to Mike, obviously convinced that he was going to be on her side of the argument, for once. “You think this is crazy too, right?”

Oh, the irony! Mike partly agreed with Max here—yes, he hated the thought of El going into the Upside Down without him and was scared that the Mind Flayer would sniff her out. He’d made that abundantly clear earlier, when everyone had thought he was being overdramatic. If it were up to him, if no one’s life were weighing in the balance, then El would never set a foot in that dark, twisted dimension. He’d watched Will have nightmares about it for two years and didn’t want El to suffer through the same thing. But there were other things to take into consideration and he’d now had a solid twenty minutes to think about it.

“We need all hands on deck to guard the breach,” he said slowly, weighing in his words. “As for El going in alone—”

He locked eyes with Will, trying to ask him a silent question with that look. He didn’t quite know what role Will had played in what he and El had just done in the Upside Down, what sort of ability Will might have, what his connection to El was like. This was a side of the equation that he didn’t have much control on, but he knew at least that if anyone would go into the Upside Down with El, it would be Will. No one else but Will could suggest it, though. 

“I should go,” Will finally said. He spoke in a thin, reedy voice, with on his face the expression of a man walking to his death. “I can sense when the Mind Flayer is near and—”

“No, you stay out of the Upside Down,” El said. 

This cracked Will’s expression of terrified resignation and he now looked mostly confused. “What? No, I have to come with you! _This_ —” He gestured at his face, where you could still see tiny specks of crusted blood under his nose. “—this has to mean something! I can _help_.”

“You _will_ help,” El said, reaching out to cup one of his cheeks. “You will be with me, but with your mind. Like we just did, right? That way you will be able to see more than with just your eyes, and the others can protect you while you’re on the lookout. Okay?”

“The lookout,” Will repeated, his mouth twisting in a bitter grimace. 

“ _Protecting_ me,” El insisted. “Protecting me and Hopper. You’re the only one who can do it.”

“Okay,” he murmured, his eyes not leaving El.

They looked like they’d forgotten that they weren’t alone in the room, totally absorbed with each other. Mike was surprised at how little jealousy he felt, watching them act so close—this was something he’d worried about, him getting jealous, because he knew himself to be a little possessive and he didn’t want it to ruin everything between the three of them. They looked so right together, though, so beautiful, so courageous, that he couldn’t muster any bad feeling about it. It would be like watching the sun set over the ocean and feel excluded because they were meeting without you. He knew they were both afraid—or at least, El was afraid, while Will was feeling something deeper, sharper than simple fear, something strong enough to shatter his sanity. And yet they would do what they had to do, because they were both fighters. Will would object to being described that way— _El is a fighter, yes,_ he would say, _but I’m not, that’s a ridiculous idea_ —but from where Mike was standing, it was nonetheless accurate. The love he felt for both of them swelled inside his chest, acquiring sudden physical weight, and he got irrationally worried that it would explode and wreck his ribs, because no feeling could be that powerful and leave you unscathed. 

“We don’t have to decide this right now, anyway,” he said, shocked to hear how composed he sounded when he was feeling anything but. “We’re not doing this today.”

“Then tomorrow,” El said.

“How are you doing with your powers?” he asked her. “Are they back completely?”

She pressed her lips together and he could tell that she wanted to say that yes, they were, but was bound by the command that he’d imparted on the day they’d met. _Friends don’t lie._

“I don’t know,” she said. 

“Try moving something.”

El turned to a pile of boxes on the table, games that they’d played and hadn’t bothered to put away. She stared intently at them and outstretched her open hand toward them, her forehead rippled from the strain of her focus. For a few seconds, nothing happened and Mike’s heart sank—if El’s powers weren’t back, then their whole plan fell apart. She would have no way to defend herself against the Mind Flayer or any of the monsters that roamed in the Upside Down. But then the game on top of the pile, and old Monopoly game that Mike had played with his whole life, started to quiver and slide gently to the left until it fell over the edge of the table and crashed down. The shock of the fall cracked the box open and cards, plastic tokens and fake Monopoly bills spilled on the floor.

“They’re back,” El said, wiping fresh blood from her nose.

“But not as strong as before,” Mike said. “You need to practice.”

“Hopper is waiting,” she said, but her eyes were on the bills spread on the floor and she looked unhappy with her performance. “We can’t make him wait for too long. He’s all alone there.”

“Just for a few days, until you’re back into shape,” he said, although in truth he didn’t know how long it would take for El to regain full mastery of her powers. “So here’s the plan: when El is ready, she’ll open a small breach into the Upside Down, just wide enough for her to get in. Will, you’ll stay outside and help her from there. We’ll guard you and the breach, make sure that no monster comes out. All in favor—”

“Mike,” Nancy said, “I really don’t like this. And I don’t like not telling Joyce Byers about it.”

“Nancy! You _promised_.”

“I know, but I don’t feel—”

“ _You_ ’ll be there, won’t you? If you’re worried that us kids can’t handle it, then you can come with us and help us guard the breach. You’re almost an adult, right? You can get Jonathan and Steve and whoever to come too.”

She narrowed her eyes at him, suspicious of his manipulation but not unmoved by flattery. Mike knew how eager his sister was to finally be an adult, how much she acted like she already was—he privately didn’t believe that being an adult was all it was cracked up to be, but he knew it was something Nancy _yearned_ for.

“All hands on deck, you said?” 

“Yeah.”

“I’ll ask Jonathan, Steve and Robin to join us. I’ll have a hard time convincing Jonathan not to tell your mom, Will.”

“Don’t be so sure,” Will said. “He knows what she’s like.”

“So training El is the next stage of your plan?” Lucas asked.

“Yes,” Mike said. “We’re training El.”

It was a very generous ‘we’, because in truth El didn’t really need anyone’s help to practice her powers. Still, most of the party attended her practice sessions. They did it in the Byerses’ back yard when Joyce was at work, building targets for El to use her telekinesis on and cheering her on. Nancy and Jonathan sometimes came too, taking their jobs as watchful older siblings seriously. As Will had predicted, it hadn’t taken much to convince Jonathan not to tell his mother, although he’d made the party promise several times that they wouldn’t try anything on their own.

By the time the weekend rolled in, El had regained most of the raw power and the control she’d had on it before, and looked like she would soon be ready to take on the Upside Down. Mike wasn’t exactly happy about it, but besides insisting on caution there wasn’t much he could do. When she would feel she was ready, nothing would stop her from going to Hopper’s rescue. 

“Oh, wow, okay,” he said after she’d _literally_ blown up the glass soda bottle they’d put on a stool as a target. “Man, that was impressive.”

El beamed at him, an expression made disturbing by the blood on her face. The setting sun made her hair glow like it had caught fire. She looked radiant, as though she’d gotten back an essential part of herself that she’d barely managed to survive without. He’d thought she was doing okay at accepting that her powers were lost for good, but the contrast between how she looked now and how she had looked for the past few months was too striking for him to still believe it. It gave his heart an uneasy pang—he would never not feel a little thrill at seeing her use her powers, a literal superheroine that had bulldozered into his life, but recently the awe had been mixed with fear over what those powers could be doing to her. He was sometimes scared that she was like a shooting star, burning bright but fading fast.

“This was great, El,” Will said, breaking Mike out of his melancholy.

Will and Mike were sitting together on an upturned box, watching El practice. The three of them were the only ones left in the Byerses’ yard, Dustin having left twenty minutes ago. Nancy had homework to do, Jonathan was at his part-time job, and Joyce was doing a late shift. There was no one but them at the house, and once Mike had realized it, he found himself not in the mood for practice anymore.

“Hey, it’s getting late, so maybe we should call it a day. We could watch a movie or play a game. Just—just the three of us.”

They hadn’t had much alone time since they’d decided that the three of them would all date, so they hadn’t really been able to explore what it meant. Will ducked his head, a blush creeping up his face, and Mike knew he’d had the same thought. 

“We go get Hopper tomorrow,” El said.

“Are you sure that—”

“I’m ready. We can’t wait any longer.”

“El—”

“ _Mike._ ”

Mike sighed, pouring all of his fear and anxiety into that sigh in the hope that they would be drained away. “Will, are you ready to do this tomorrow?”

Will leaned against Mike’s side, his eyes cast down. “If we wait until I’m ready we’ll never do it. So don’t wait on me—if El says she’s ready, then we get on with the plan.” 

Mike looked at him, a burst of emotion making his chest feel tight— _I love you so much_ —and then when it became unbearable, he leaned over and pressed a kiss on Will’s temple, just because he had a right to it now. 

Will blinked at him, looking startled. “What was that about?” he asked.

“What, do I need an excuse to kiss you?” Mike said. “We’re dating, remember?”

“Like I could forget.”

“But since you’re asking—I just think you’re amazing, that’s all. What you’re doing is badass.”

“Yeah, right,” Will said with a self-depreciating snort. “Blowing up bottles with the power of your mind, that’s _badass_. Me, I’m—”

“Hey,” Mike said, nudging him with his shoulder. They were still pressed shoulder to hip and the heat that Mike got from Will’s body felt good in a way that was becoming embarrassing. “Remember when you were possessed by the Mind Flayer?”

“You mean when I was a spy for the enemy and I got a lot of people killed, including my mom’s boyfriend?”

“You’re the one who told us how to stop him,” Mike said, undeterred. “You were like—like a prisoner behind the enemy line, risking your life to pass on crucial intel. If that’s not badass, then I don’t know what is. Right, El?”

“Right,” El said, vigorously nodding her approval.

“You don’t have to try to make me feel better.”

“Well, first, we _do_ have to make you feel better. It’s kind of in the job description of being a girlfriend or a boyfriend. And second, we’re not just saying—we really believe it. I know I do.”

“Badass,” El said with another nod. 

Her hair was wind-blown and her cheeks rosy from the cooling air. The blood that had dripped from her nose stained her teeth and made her look a little feral, which gave her assessment of Will’s badassery more weight. Will held her eyes for a moment and then shrugged in reluctant acceptance.

“Let’s get inside, okay?” he said, changing the subject, like he often did when he was embarrassed. “It’s getting chilly.”

“I told Max I’d meet with her when I was done,” El said, zipping up her jacket. 

“What?” Mike said, his daydream of quiet time with Will and El shattering. “Don’t you want to stay with us? We can do anything you want. We don’t have to stay in, we could—”

“You and Will,” El said, pointing at them. “You’ve never had alone time as boyfriends. You and me have had a lot of alone time, and I live with Will, but you and Will don’t ever see each other without me anymore.”

“But—” Mike looked over at Will for some clue on what was the protocol was here, but Will just shook his head and was no help at all. “I mean, if we’re all dating, then we should spend time all together.”

When El had become his girlfriend, he’d found that the moments he had alone with her were different from the moments they had together with their friends. He had, in truth, gone a little overboard with the thrill of having her all to himself, to the point that it had started to affect his friendship with the others—especially with Will, for reasons that neither of them had wanted to examine too closely at the time. But Will and El were both his boyfriend and girlfriend, and he didn’t want either of them to think he liked the other one better.

“Maybe it doesn’t have to be the three of us together all the time,” Will said hesitantly. “Maybe it’d be good to spend some time in pairs—just, you know, we’d have to be careful that no one feels left out.”

“I guess it makes sense,” Mike said. 

It wasn’t that he didn’t want alone time with Will—the mere thought had set his insides on fire—but the suggestion made him realize for the first time what an odd balancing act their relationship was going to be, and the fear of screwing it up put him on edge. 

“Good!” El exclaimed, clapping her hands. “I’ll see you later.”

She left after giving both Mike and Will’s cheeks a kiss. When she was gone, Will got up to pick up the shards of glass that were left from El smashing or blowing up bottles. Mike went to help him and their fingers brushed every so often, making Mike feel awkward and self-conscious in a way he’d never been with Will before. By the time they went back inside and shed their jackets, his mind was whirling madly—what should they do now that El wasn’t there to act as a buffer? What should he say? How should he act? This was _Will_ , and they’d been alone with each other plenty of times before, but never like this, with a cloud of nebulous expectations hovering over them. For a moment, Mike almost regretted his confession from the week before, wishing he could transport himself back to simpler times, back when they were just friends and knew exactly how they were supposed to behave, back when Mike didn’t feel like he would die from how intensely he felt about Will. It had been hard enough to manage his feelings for El.

“So, what do you want to do?” he asked Will, picking up the remote that had been stuck between the couch’s cushions, just for something to do with his hands and for an excuse to not be looking at Will for a moment. “Do you want to rent a movie, or—shit, I should have brought my game of—”

“Hey, Mike.”

“What?” Mike said, turning around.

Will grabbed his arms at the elbow and pulled him in, suddenly enough that Mike dropped the remote. Will surged forward too hastily, and instead of kissing Mike’s mouth like he’d probably meant to, he crashed their noses together and they both groaned in unison. 

“I’m sorry,” Will said, drawing away. “I was just trying to—”

Before he could fully disengage, Mike cut his sentence short by kissing him. Will made a small sound, something halfway between a moan and a groan, and it made Mike kiss him again, more slowly and deliberately. Will was still holding Mike’s arms, his thumbs pressing inside the crooks of his elbows—it left Mike’s hands free and after a moment of hesitation they landed on Will’s hips. Mike’s mind, which almost never shut up, couldn’t help at first comparing the way Will and El felt. Will was taller and Mike didn’t have to lean as much, his lips were thinner, cool from being outside a moment before, but his mouth was broader, and he was more tentative, less forceful than El was. But then Will pulled him along until they were stumbling onto the couch, Mike half-lying, half-sitting with Will partly sprawled over him. Will’s pointy elbows dug into Mike’s sides, his weight crushed one of Mike’s thighs, and the solid feeling of his body made Mike’s head spin.

Their kisses became wetter as Will got more confident, meeting Mike’s mouth more firmly than before, and Mike thought about using tongue but didn’t dare it—he’d only started doing it with El recently and didn’t want to startle Will by moving too fast. It was getting warm in the room, or maybe it was just that Will was draped all over him, but in any case Mike’s cheeks felt on fire and his body was growing hot and tingly. The more they kissed, the more that heat became focused and intense, descending lower, until— _Oh, Jesus, please don’t._

He’d had boners while making out with El before, but El’s knowledge of the male body was fuzzy enough that he’d always managed to conceal it from her. Will, on the other hand, was a boy too, so when Mike tried to move his hips away, Will stopped kissing him and looked down.

“I’m sorry,” Mike said quickly.

“It’s okay,” Will said, his flushed face filling Mike’s entire vision field. “I, um, me too.”

Will’s quiet admission made Mike’s face heat up and triggered a panicky flutter at the center of his chest. With El, he was still stuck in a phase where the idea of having to explain to her what an erection was felt way too embarrassing to even consider having her touch it. Will, though, wouldn’t require any explanation. A range of countless possibilities fanned out in Mike’s mind; that they could actually _touch_ each other’s hard-ons sprung on the forefront and all at once Mike felt too hot, dizzy and scared. 

They remained frozen up for a while, looking at each other, full of uncertainty, until they heard the front door slam shut and both jumped, Will almost kneeing Mike in the crotch. 

Jonathan’s voice floated up to them. “I’m home!” 

Numb from shock and their previous arousal, they weren’t quick enough to separate before Jonathan entered the living room. Will was still leaning over Mike, a knee planted between his thighs and both hands on his shoulders.

 _We were just tussling_. The lie was on Mike’s lips but he didn’t let it come out. Needing to explain what they were doing would probably make their positions appear even more incriminating. Anyway, from the wide-eyed look Jonathan was giving them, they probably didn’t look at all like they’d been caught doing a bit of friendly roughhousing. 

“What,” Jonathan said, then obviously didn’t know how to continue that sentence. 

Meanwhile, Will had moved away from Mike and stood up. Mike wanted to grab the hem of his shirt and pull him back to him, but he contained the childish impulse. 

“Where’s El?” Jonathan finally asked, and _ouch_ , that hurt. Even knowing that he wasn’t cheating on El, the mere thought that someone would think he was upset Mike. 

“She’s at Max’s,” Will said. “It’s not what you think—well, not entirely. I’ll explain.”

“I’ll just—I’ll go,” Mike said, fumbling for the jacket he’d thrown over the arm of the couch. “Unless you want me to—” he added hesitantly at Will’s intention.

“No, it’s better if you go home,” Will said. “I’ll tell Jonathan everything.”

“Okay.”

Walking past Jonathan on his way to the front door felt excruciatingly long, like the short distance had been distorted to put Mike through extra torture. Jonathan had never been anything but friendly to him, but the look that Mike got as he walked to the door was cool and assessing, like Jonathan had shifted gears and Mike had changed categories from ‘little brother’s friend’ and ‘girlfriend’s little brother’ to ‘stranger that might threaten my family.’ His stomach down to his socks, Mike grabbed the door handle, but just as he was about to open the door he was stopped by Will calling his name. 

“Mike, wait.”

He turned around and saw Will rush to him. Will cupped his face with his two hands and kissed him hard on the mouth. Mike’s heart skipped a beat.

“It’ll be all right,” Will whispered. “I’ll explain what’s going on to my brother and he’ll understand. You don’t have to look so down.”

“I’m just tired,” Mike said nonsensically. 

Will shook his head with a fond, ‘you’re an idiot’ expression. Mike wanted to be outraged, but his heart had started up again and was now beating too hard from Will’s kiss. When he left the Byerses’ house, he felt like he was walking on clouds. 

—-

Of course, once the front door had closed behind Mike, all of Will’s confidence melted like snow under blazing sunlight. He wasn’t afraid that Jonathan would react violently, like their father would have—now was a person that Will never ever wanted to tell about his dating situation. He wasn’t sure what he was afraid of, exactly, but his insides were tightly knotted and his palms were slick with perspiration. It was probably because the way Jonathan was looking at him right now was completely unfamiliar—wary, with an undercurrent of disappointment. Jonathan must be thinking that Will and Mike were acting behind El’s back, and he was _wrong_ , of course, as Will would explain to him in a moment, but what if he found the truth even worse than what he’d assumed?

“Will, I—” Jonathan said, then sighed. “Let’s sit down. Come on.”

Will couldn’t feel his legs anymore but somehow managed to walk up to the couch and sit down on it. He couldn’t look Jonathan in the eye, and he should have been preparing what he was going to say but his mind was as blank as a layer of fresh snow.

This gave Jonathan the opportunity to start speaking first. “I’m not mad,” he said, which made Will feel worse rather than better. “If you—if you like boys, or like _Mike_ , it’s totally okay. Never mind what Dad says, what everybody says, that doesn’t make you wrong. You’re not _wrong_ , Will. All right?”

 _I_ am _wrong_ , Will thought. _Just not in the way you think. Not because of who I like_. That feeling of wrongness had never left him since he’d come back from the Upside Down. At first, it had probably just been the Mind Flayer’s influence, the way the shadowed monster had curled in a corner of his brain and messed with his perception; but even after the Mind Flayer’s had been forcibly exorcised, Will had felt the wrongness persist, like a line of fracture running along the surface of his mind. It was easy to blame it all on the PTSD, but since his mind trip in the Upside Down with El, Will had started to wonder if the wrongness hadn’t always been a part of him—just like his dad had always said, although not for the reasons his dad had claimed. Maybe this was why the Upside Down had happened to him; not a senseless accident, no wrong time wrong place happenstance, but the sign that Will was a magnet that drew badness to him. 

But this was a wholly different issue from what he was discussing with Jonathan and not something Will wanted to get into now—or ever, really. He didn’t want his concerns to get to El’s ears, because the last thing he wished would be for her to believe that he thought _she_ was wrong. Why he was so sure that he was wrong and El wasn’t, he couldn’t tell, but it was a deep, intimate conviction that he couldn’t shake off. 

Jonathan seemed to be expecting some kind of reply, so Will mumbled a half-convinced “yeah, sure.”

“That’s not the problem,” Jonathan said, his voice soft and raspy and so, so burdened. “But you know that life hasn’t been kind to El, and that we—”

“El knows,” Will blurted out, unable to bear hearing more.

“What?”

“We’re not cheating. I mean, Mike isn’t cheating. El knows. She’s okay with it. We’re actually—we’re trying to—date, all three of us.”

“I don’t get it,” Jonathan said, his eyebrows knitting together. 

“Mike and El are still dating, but I’m dating them too and they’re dating me. We all like each other.”

Will could almost see the wheels turn in his brother’s mind as Jonathan processed the words. “Are you sure that El really understands what she’s getting into?” he asked.

“She was the one who suggested it,” Will said. “She’s not stupid, you know.”

“I know she’s not, but she lacks experience about a lot of things.”

“She understands as much as we do,” Will said. 

“And do _you_ understand what you’re getting into?” Jonathan asked in a flash of big brother perceptiveness. “When you said that you’re all dating, do you mean you and El too? Because I thought—”

“I think I am—that I don’t—I’m probably gay, yes. But El and I—” It was a struggle to put it into words for the first time. El hadn’t needed an explanation, because she got it, and Mike had simply accepted it. The rest of the party hadn’t dared ask too personal questions about their arrangement. But Jonathan was going to need more, so Will had to find a way to make him understand. “I don’t know, she’s really special. Special in general, and special to me. I don’t, um, _see_ her the way I see Mike. I don’t really want to, uh… with her.”

“Have sex, you mean?” Jonathan said, now sounding faintly amused.

This made Will choke on his own spit, mainly because of the flashback he got of the position Mike and he had been in a moment before, of feeling himself get hard from kissing Mike and then realizing that Mike was hard too. It used to be that Willl’s deeply buried and shameful fantasies concerning Mike mostly involved holding hands and some kissing. Making out with him only once had blown those childish daydreams out of the water and opened a pit of darker, more adult wants. It also made the line between the way he felt about Mike and the way he felt about El clearer: even without trying it, he had a notion that making out with El, while it might be pleasant, would not make him hard as easily. 

“I can’t believe we’re talking about you having sex,” Jonathan said, cuffing the back of Will’s head and then ruffling his hair. “You’re just fourteen. You’re still a baby.”

“I’m not a _baby_.”

“I know, Will,” Jonathan said. “I’m just messing with you.”

“And we’re not having sex. What you saw—us kissing—it was only the second time it’d happened. So sex is, uh, not in the cards right now.”

“It’ll happen soon enough,” Jonathan said, his smile turning a little wistful. 

“How old were you the first time you…?” 

Will’s cheeks felt a little hot, from embarrassment rather than from being turned on this time, but Jonathan was the only person he could see himself talking to about those things without wanting a pit to open up under his feet.

“Seventeen. It was with Nancy. I’m not much of a Casanova.”

“I’m not either.”

“Well, you did manage to score two people at once,” Jonathan said laughingly, giving the back of Will’s neck a little squeeze. 

“Shut up,” Will said, shoving at him lightly.

“Hey, did mom give you the talk already? I must have been about fourteen when she gave it to me.”

“No, _she_ probably think I’m still a baby. Or too fragile to think about dating.”

“Hey, Will, that’s not fair.”

“I know,” Will said with a sigh, remembering how _he_ ’d be the one to tell his mom that he would never be in love. He’d been lying, of course, not telling her that he was already in love and thought it sucked. “I’m sorry. But I don’t really want to tell her about El, Mike and I yet.”

“My lips are sealed, then. And if you have any questions… I know you said you’re not having sex for the moment, but you know you can always come to me.”

“I know. And, changing the subject, but we’re thinking about doing it tomorrow.”

“Do what?”

“Go to the Upside Down to save Hopper.”

Jonathan’s teasing, affectionate expression died down at the declaration. He withdrew his hand and twined his fingers together, elbows on his knees. By now, it was so dark outside that soft shadows had invaded the living room, making everything look like it was fading, dissolving like the afterimage of a dream. Will should be getting up and turning on the light instead of squinting at his brother, trying to guess what he was thinking from the wrinkling pattern on his forehead. 

“Are you sure about this?” Jonathan asked quietly after a long stretch of silence. 

_No, I’m not._ Will wanted to get angry at the question, because anger was easier to handle than self-doubt, but this was Jonathan, and after the ease of the previous conversation it felt jarring to get mad now. “Everyone is relying on me. And, to be perfectly honest, it feels kind of good. Since that day—since the demogorgon—I feel like it’s always other people looking out for me and it’s not like I’m not grateful that they care, but… It’s nice to be on the other side of it, for a change.”

“You’re doing an incredibly brave thing.”

Will shook his head, his skin prickling with embarrassment at the word, just like when Mike and El had told him he was badass. “No, I’m not. I’m just doing what needs to be done.”

Jonathan patted the side of his neck. “Precisely,” he said.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Merry Christmas! :D We're going to the Upside Down next week.


	6. Chapter 6

However you looked at it, what they were getting ready to do was completely insane. Two different gates had been opened, closing each of them had been hell, and they were about to make a new breach into the Upside Down. Since Mike’s terse message on the walkie of ‘we’re doing it tomorrow,’ Lucas had been on edge, only able to grab a couple hours of sleep during the night. Now that they’d started planning their mission, though, all of them huddled in Mike’s basement, he was actually starting to relax. Planning made him think of D&D, infusing him with a calming sense of ‘ _I’ve been here before._ ’ He knew if wasn’t the same, of course—he wasn’t an idiot, and by now he was well acquainted with the difference between fighting real monsters and imaginary ones. Still, going over the details of their plan settled his nerves.

It might have also been also the presence of the others beside him that helped him calm down. Mrs. Wheeler had looked a bit puzzled to see Nancy, Jonathan, Steve, and Robin—who she’d never met before—join the usual party members in the basement, but Lucas was relieved that the older teens were there too. Each of them had proven that they were tough and willing to fight, and if they were going to do this without Mrs. Byers or Hopper, then Lucas was glad to have reliable people on their side.

“The first thing we need to decide is where we’re gonna do this,” Mike said. 

He had unfolded a map of the area on the table and was pointing at it like a general explaining his strategy to his troops. And like good, obedient troops, they’d all gathered around the table and were looking at the map too. 

“This seems obvious to me,” Nancy said. “You said that Hopper was in Lover’s Lake—well, in the Upside Down’s equivalent of it. That’s where we should go to open the breach. We want El to spend as little time in the Upside Down as possible.”

“I’ve thought about that,” Mike said, smoothing out the folds on the map with a finger, “and the problem with doing it at Lover’s Lake is that there are always a lot of people there. It wouldn’t be safe.”

“Then we do it at night, when no one’s there,” Nancy said.

“It’ll still be out in the open,” Mike said. “It’ll be harder to keep the monsters from running away. You said it, Nance: if even just one of these monsters are loose and people get hurt, it’ll be _our_ fault.”

Nancy held Mike’s eyes for a long moment. Everyone else kept quiet while the Wheeler siblings had their staring contest—until Nancy sighed, looked away and then down at the map.

“Where, then?” she asked wearily. 

“The lab,” El said in a quiet voice, pointing at the location of Hawkins National Laboratory on the map. Everyone hunched over the map to look at it.

“It’s not far from Lover’s Lake,” Dustin conceded with a tilt of his head.

“And we know it’s empty,” Jonathan said.

“And we can control all the exits,” Mike murmured, his gaze drawn inward. 

Something about his expression, pinched but determined, was unsettling to Lucas. “What do you mean?” he asked, his stomach tightening with unnamed dread.

“We’ll have to find a room that doesn’t have too many exits—and then we block all of them.”

“Wait, wait, okay,” Steve said, raking his fingers through his voluminous hair. “Block the exits, you say?”

“We can’t let any demogorgon leave the lab alive.”

“No, I get that part. But if we block the exits—barricade them, right?—then aren’t _we_ at risk of being stuck and getting killed?”

“If we can leave the room easily, then so can they,” Mike said very softly.

The churn of dread at the pit of Lucas’ stomach only got stronger from the look on Mike’s face—there was something too calm about it, too old for their fourteen years of existence. It wasn’t Mike being dramatic like he could be sometimes. On the contrary, there was something disturbingly restrained about his expression.

Dustin swallowed audibly. “A last stand,” he whispered. 

“We have to be willing to die trying to keep them in,” Mike said. 

From anyone else it might have sounded ridiculous, but Mike had a knack for making it sound like it came straight out of a story, and yet chillingly real at the same time. 

“Fucking hell,” Steve said in a breath.

“Shit,” Max said, her already pale complexion getting even paler. 

“Mike, I can’t,” Nancy said, her words clipped, “I can’t let you do this.”

“Oh, you can’t _let_ me?” Mike exclaimed, immediately incensed. “You’re not my mom!”

“But I’m your big sister, and since you wouldn’t let me involve any adult—”

“So you’re willing to let Hopper rot in the Upside Down?”

“I’m not saying that, but—”

“El and Will are going to do this because no one else can do what they can! You can’t expect me to wait and do nothing!”

“Yeah, about that,” Jonathan said, hugging himself. “How exactly is this—” He waved a hand between El and Will. “—is going to work? What will my brother be doing?”

“I’ll be, uh, mentally connected to El as she looks for Hopper.” Will exchanged a look with El, as though seeking confirmation. “I’ll be watching her back, especially against the Mind Flayer.”

“But you won’t be _in_ the Upside Down?”

“No, I’ll be on the outside with you.”

“Okay,” Jonathan said, seemingly comforted by that simple fact.

“Nancy,” Mike said, “you know we have to do this.”

“It’s the part where we’ll be locking ourselves in with those monsters that I’m unsure about!”

“If we can leave, so can they!” He addressed the rest of the group a firm look. “So if anyone wants to bow out, you have to do it now.”

Nervous glances were exchanged until everyone’s eyes converged on Robin, who’d remained quiet so far. “What?” she said defensively. “Why is everyone looking at me? Do I look like I’d be the most easily scared? I’m not a coward!”

“She so isn’t,” Steve said. “Believe me, I’ve faced crazy Russians with her. She’s got balls of steel.”

“Thanks, Harrington,” Robin said with a touch of sarcasm.

“It’s not that we think you’re a coward,” Jonathan said. “But—”

“You haven’t been there since the start,” Nancy said. “You haven’t seen everything we’ve seen. It’d be a lot to ask you to do something so crazy.”

“Yeah, and now that I know, I can’t turn my back on it and let the kids handle it.” She put a hand palm down over the little rectangle that marked the lab on the map. “So I’m in.”

“We agree, then?” Mike asked. He put his own hand on top of Robin’s. “No monster gets out.”

“No monster,” El agreed, adding her hand on top of Mike’s.

“We won’t let them,” Will said, doing the same.

Strangely enough, throughout the discussion the cold feeling in Lucas’ stomach had quieted. Playing D&D, they’d done their share of standing their ground against overwhelming enemies—and yes, again, Lucas knew it wasn’t the same thing. There would be no starting over a new campaign after a TPK; dead was dead. But he was feeling imbued with the same sense of sad purpose and he could finally understand the look on Mike’s face. This was what going from doing it in a game to doing it in real life felt like.

“No monster gets out,” he echoed, resting his hand on Will’s.

Max repeated the phrase, then Dustin, both of them adding their own hands. Nancy and Jonathan shared a long look before imitating them. Steve was the only one who hadn’t added his hand to the pile and he pursed his mouth, his expression pouty under everyone’s expectant stares.

“Yeah, like I would let you assholes get killed without me,” he said at last. His hand joined the precarious pile of all of their hands, resting on top of Jonathan’s. Despite the gravity of the situation, Lucas could feel a smile tug at the corner of his lips and he could see the feeling mirrored on the others’ faces. A strange sense of excitement blew over the group, something that mixed the hysteria that came from knowing how crazy what they were doing was with the comfort of doing it together. For once, they weren’t just reacting to a monster incursion in their town; they were bringing the fight to the Upside Down. A stupid thing to do, most likely, but they were doing it and it was too late to back down now. 

That feeling of elation lasted almost as long as it took them to get ready and head for the lab. In preparation for this day, Lucas, Max and Dustin had made bats spiked with nails for themselves, like the one Steve had, and Jonathan had stolen the shotgun that his mom kept in the shed. After a moment of hesitation, Lucas also brought the toy gun he’d gotten for his birthday—it only shot plastic bullets, but well-aimed it could do a fair amount of damage and Lucas felt better for having a ranged weapon. They all wore long sleeves and multiple layers in the hope that it would give them a bit of protection against the monster’s claws. Dustin had wanted to wear his hockey gear, but Lucas and Mike had argued that it would make him a lot less nimble and able to move out of the demogorgons’ way. Steve was charged with bringing wooden boards and nails that they would use to block the exits, which he pinched from his dad’s tool shed. 

Steve and Robin came in Steve’s car with the equipment, but Jonathan’s car had broken down so the rest of the group went on foot. The walk to the lab was long enough that Lucas’ confidence started to crack on the way there. By the time they came in sight of the lab and the memories of coming there for the first time when he was looking for Will started pouring in, his hands were shaking and he shoved them in his pockets before anyone else could see it.

Unfortunately, not a lot of things escaped Max’s keen eyes. “Getting cold feet, Sinclair?” she asked, low enough that the others probably couldn’t hear.

Lucas’ terror was too great for him to get offended. He also knew her well enough to be aware that her snark was a shield she used to cover for her own fear. “Just thinking of all the things I wished I’d done before I died,” he replied.

It had been meant as a joke, but given the circumstances it wasn’t a very good one. Watching Max’s expression darken, he thought about all the things he wouldn’t get to do with her if they died today. Getting out of Hawkins, maybe to college, going on real dates that weren’t just hanging at the arcades or the mall. Living together. Having _sex_. He must have made a weird face at that last thought, because Max lifted an inquisitive eyebrow at him.

“You doing okay there, Rambo?” she asked.

“Yeah, just thinking.”

“Well, don’t,” Max said somberly. “If we start thinking then we’ll never manage to do what we need to do.”

It was easy enough to get into the lab. The gates weren’t powered anymore and the only obstacles were the chains on the doors. Steve had brought shears with him, also taken from his dad’s tool shed, and that took care of the problem. The inside of the lab was dark and eerily silent. When they entered the lobby, dimly lit from the pale daylight that flowed from the outside, Mike swept the beam of his flashlight over the floor and said, “This is where Bob died.”

Lucas looked at where Mike’s flashlight had pointed. The floor was dirty and strewn with dead leaves, but was that _blood_ over there? “You mean this exact spot?” he asked, feeling a little queasy. 

“No, uh, I. I didn’t see it. I was outside with Will. But I know it was in the lobby.”

“Jesus, Mike,” Max said, giving him a shove. “We so didn’t need to know that.”

Mike shook himself, looking like he was waking up for a bad dream. “Sorry,” he said. “Bad memories.”

“This place gives me the creeps,” Robin said with a shudder.

“Bad place,” El said softly.

Her eyes were on the elevator doors, opened on a thin rectangle of darkness, like she expected someone to come out of them at any moment—maybe the man she’d called ‘Papa’, or one of the military guys, back to capture and lock her up again. Her face was pale and her eyes wild and childish, her expression similar to what it had been when they’d met her two years ago, acting more like a feral animal than a girl. Mike took her hand and murmured something to her ear while Will moved close to her other side.

“Let’s not linger,” Nancy said.

The deeper they went into the lab, the darker it was, and soon enough they all needed to turn on their flashlights. Shattered glass panes and brownish stains that could only be blood were everywhere, a reminder of the demodogs attacking the lab when Will and Mike were there—at least the military had taken away the bodies, even though they hadn’t cleaned up any of the mess. Their footsteps echoed in the empty building, with the occasional accompanying crunching noise when they stepped on broken glass. The echoes amplified and multiplied the sounds of their steps to the point that Lucas sometimes startled and looked behind him, suddenly convinced that there was someone else in the lab, tracking them. The dance of their various flashlights made the shadows jump at them, revealing open doorways, their doors having been torn off their hinges, and the skeletal silhouettes of empty shelves. It smelled weird, too, moldy and damp but also like rot and sulfur, the stench of the demodogs lingering like an olfactive scar. 

El was their guide, supposedly leading them to a room that wouldn’t have too many exits, but also would be big enough that they would have the space to fight. They meandered across the lab for so long, though, that Lucas suspected that El wasn’t exactly sure where she was going. How well did she know the place, anyway? It seemed unlikely that the military had let her wander around much. He didn’t voice his concerns, because he was actually grateful for the stalling and didn’t want to put El on the spot. They’d get wherever they had to be soon enough.

Eventually, El stopped in front of a room whose door was ajar and said, “Here.”

The room still had some equipment in it, although not anything super cool—the government must have taken away the most expensive stuff with them when they left, and the only things left were some glassware and a broken microscope. There were two doors, the one they’d gone through and another one at the back of the room, both of them intact. 

“Okay,” Steve said, dropping the clunking bag he’d been carrying on his shoulder. “Let’s get to work.”

They’d done that kind of teamwork before—the time they’d anonymized the Byerses’ shed for Will’s interrogation came to mind—so they worked pretty swiftly, with barely a word to each other. They nailed wooden boards over both doors and moved some of the dead, bulky machines in front of each as extra obstacles. Once they were done, Steve gave their handiwork a critical look and said, “I guess that will do.”

“They can break through this, though, can’t they?” Nancy said.

“Oh, yes, they can,” Mike said. “But they’d need to have killed all of us before.”

“This really isn’t the pep talk you seem to think it is, Mike,” Dustin said. 

“Is there anything else we need to do before… we go through with our plan?” Jonathan asked.

“No,” El said. “It’s time to go.”

And then she sat down on the floor, signaling to Will that he should sit in front of her. Both of them drew scarves out of their bags to use as blindfolds while Dustin took out the small portable radio that he’d brought for that purpose. Robin and Steve looked a little puzzled at the proceedings.

“What’re they doing?” Steve whispered conspicuously to Nancy’s ear.

“I think they—”

“They’re establishing a connection to each other,” Dustin said. “They’ll need it so Will can watch out for El in the Upside Down. Now, shush. They need to focus.”

Will and El joined hands, like they’d done in Mike’s basement for their mind walk in the Upside Down. The wait for them to do whatever mind magic they needed for the mission gave Lucas time to mull over what they were about to do and get a fresh shot of fear right into his veins. Everyone was looking at El and Will, even though they weren’t doing anything except sit there with their hands linked and breathe deeply, probably to avoid looking at each other and reading fear in the others. It wasn’t the time to get panicked. It wasn’t the time to get second thoughts and to want to go home—and yet this was exactly what Lucas was thinking about. He wouldn’t abandon the others after they’d made a promise to each other, of course not, and anyway he _couldn’t_ do that now that they’d boarded up the doors. Still, Lucas couldn’t help but mournfully imagine how he would have occupied his Sunday if they hadn’t decided to go on a suicide mission. Maybe he’d be reading comic books on his bed or watching a movie at the mall with the rest of the party, or doing his homework, which sounded much more fun now that possibly dying was the alternative. It was a nice thing to think about, nicer than to reflect on what would happen once El and Will were finished mind-melting with each other. 

El dragged her blindfold down her face and said, “We’re ready.”

Will didn’t move an inch, his chest visibly moving up and down with his slow breaths. Jonathan shot him a worried glance, but El smiled to convey to him that nothing bad was happening. She went to each member of the group, even the ones who didn’t belong to the party, and gave them a hug. When she got to Lucas, he pressed his face into her hair, which smelled citrusy, and said in a low voice, “This isn’t goodbye, right? You’re coming back.”

“Yes,” she said.

 _Friends don’t lie,_ he wanted to say, but didn’t want to make his fears too real by voicing them out loud. El couldn’t be sure that she was coming back, the same way Lucas couldn’t be sure that he wouldn’t be killed by one of the Upside Down’s monsters coming out of the breach. This was, after all, the oath they’d taken—that they were ready to die to guarantee the mission’s success. 

She kissed him on the cheek and then moved on to Mike, who she’d kept for last. The two shared a long, lingering kiss, Mike gripping El’s shoulders as though he didn’t want to let her go. She had to gently unclasp his hands so he would release her, whispering something to him that Lucas was too far to overhear. Whatever it was, it made Mike sigh and say, “Yeah, I know.”

Lucas was surprised for a second that El didn’t do any goodbye gesture to Will, until he remembered that technically Will would be going into the Upside Down with her. She didn’t have to say goodbye to him because they weren’t separating. El walked to the back wall of the room. After looking intently for a few seconds at the bare concrete, she extended her hand and let out a shout so loud and so sudden that it made Lucas jump.

Watching her open up a breach to the Upside Down was awe-inspiring, and for a moment Lucas forgot all about his fears and worries. The spot on the wall that El was aiming at started to glow red, like metal melting under extreme heat. The glowing spot spread like a stain, the middle of it becoming blinding white—and then El made an abrupt hand motion and the glowing spot was torn down, revealing something that looked organic, like a reddish, pulsing membrane. El went at it with her bare hands and ripped the membrane to make a larger opening, large enough for her to get through.

“El!” Max called as El was about to pass her head through the opening. “Good luck.”

El turned around and gave her a blinding smile. “I’m better than luck,” she said. 

The torn membrane made a pretty gross suction sound as El slipped her whole body through it. Once she was gone, there was an awkward moment during which no one said anything, all eyes drawn to the dark sliver of the Upside Down that they could see through the opening—not enough to make out what was on the other side, just a patch of darkness that was all the more frightening for being so indistinct. 

“So I guess we wait, now,” Steve said. 

They’d calculated that El had a ten-minute walk to get to the lake, if all went well. It had seemed pretty short at the time but having to wait without knowing if the next thing that would come out of the opening would be El and Hopper, or a bunch of monsters, made time slow down to an impossible crawl. Most of the group stood near the opening in the wall, which kept pulsing like a living thing, except for Mike and Jonathan who stayed with Will and kept on eye on him. 

“Something’s wrong,” Mike said after what felt like hours of waiting but must have been closer to fifteen minutes. 

Everyone’s attention switched to him and Will—only Nancy kept her shotgun aimed at the breach, not letting anything distract her from her role. At first, Lucas couldn’t tell what had alarmed Mike, until he saw that the slow rise and dip of Will’s chest had quickened and that his breathing sounded erratic. Mike had gotten to his knees in front of him but as he looked about to reach out, Will’s body suddenly sagged and his breathing became slow and deep again.

“What was that?” Lucas asked.

“I think he was panicking,” Jonathan said. He combed his fingers through Will’s hair, murmuring to him, “It’s okay, buddy. We’re here with you.”

“Do you think he was like, attacked?” Robin asked. “Is El in danger?”

“I don’t know,” Mike said. “He could have just been panicking because the Upside Down is a very bad place for him. But… something’s still wrong.”

“He looks like he’s calmed down,” Max said. “This must mean that El isn’t really in danger, right?”

“I don’t think he’s calm,” Mike said. “I think he’s—detached.”

Now that Lucas was looking at Will’s posture more closely, he could sort of get what Mike meant when he said that there was still something wrong. Will wasn’t holding himself the way he had before, when he’d gotten into the trance. His shoulders had drooped and his head lolled to the side, like the bones in his body had turned rubbery. At the same time, his fingers were clenched tightly over his knees, betraying a tension that was at odds with the rest of his body.

“What do you mean, ‘detached’?” Jonathan asked anxiously.

“Isn’t it a good thing?” Steve asked. “If he’s detached, then at least he isn’t freaking out.”

“It’s not a good thing,” Mike said. “It’s what happened to him on Halloween. I guess it’s like… like he’s overloaded or something, and his mind sort of shuts down. When he’s like that, he doesn’t care about anything, which means that he can’t properly watch out for El.” 

“What can we do?” Jonathan asked.

“I’ll handle it,” Mike said, sitting down on his butt and crossing his legs.

He very gently took both of Will’s hands in his, like he was afraid of startling Will with a too sudden move. “Hey, Will,” he said in a low, soothing voice. “Can you hear me?”

Lucas watched out for a reaction, but Will didn’t seem to have any, not even a hitch in his breathing. This didn’t seem to deter Mike, who kept talking in that same quiet, slightly hypnotic tone.

“I’m here,” he said to Will. “I’m right here with you. I’m holding your hands; can you feel it?” Mike started to draw circles with his thumbs over the back of Will’s hands. “Can you feel that? I know you’re scared, but it’s going to be okay. You can do this. Behind the enemy lines, remember?”

There was something uncomfortably intimate about the scene. Lucas had never seen Mike and Will kiss, but he felt as awkward—or maybe even _more_ awkward—witnessing this as he would have been catching them making out. He didn’t think he was the only one to feel that way, because Jonathan was looking away and Robin exchanged a look with Steve, who shrugged in response. Everything about Mike’s voice, his posture, the way he stroked the back of Will’s hands with his thumbs, was so unrestrainedly gentle and loving that even the people in the room who didn’t know that Mike and Will were dating must have had an inkling that there was more going on here than friendly comforting. 

The spell was broken by Nancy’s tight voice calling, “Guys! You have to come here now.”

On the tail end of her sentence Lucas heard a sound that made the hair on the back of his neck stand: a growl, faint and distant but unmistakable. Lucas didn’t think he would ever forget what a demogorgon sounded like. Without anyone having to say it, they all positioned themselves in a half-circle in front of the breach. Lucas got his gun out, taking it in his right hand while clutching his bat in his left one. He felt a pressure on his wrist where Max had circled her hand around it and squeezed, seeking and offering support at the same time. 

“You scared?” he asked her in a whisper.

“What about you?” she retorted with a half-smile.

“Mike,” Dustin said when another, closer growl was heard from beyond the breach. “Get your ass here. All hands on deck, remember?” A high-pitched roar came from the other side of the breach. “Mike, come on!”

Lucas shot a look over his shoulder in time to see Mike lean forward, whisper something in Will’s ear and then kiss him on the mouth.

“Mike?” Nancy said, sounding puzzled, her eyes diverted from the breach for the first time.

“I thought that Mike and El were a thing,” Lucas heard Robin say to Steve in a low voice.

“Me too, but…” Steve replied in the same tone.

Mike pushed himself up to his feet and joined the half-circle of defense, his cheeks red but his chin tipped up in defiance. “Let’s not get distracted,” he said.

“We’re not the ones getting distracted,” Max said but then gave the back of Mike’s shoulder a pat. 

The growls coming from the breach multiplied and intensified, some of them morphing into screeches that echoed each other, like several of the monsters were calling to one another. Sweat prickled on Lucas’ forehead and a drop of it slowly ran down his temple. He very much wanted to pee and regretted not going before they’d entered the lab. His guts ached, too, his lunch having hardened into a block that weighed him down. 

The monsters’ cries sounded very close now. A clawed, scaly hand shot through the torn membrane, making everyone jump. The hand ripped the membrane apart and then all hell broke loose.

—-

Will walked the Upside Down, a passenger at the back of El’s mind—this really was what it felt like, as though he’d hitched a ride on her shoulder. He couldn’t read her thoughts or know what she was feeling, but he could see what she saw and hear what she heard. He knew that she would hear him if he spoke silently in his mind because they’d just tested it, but he could only hear her if she talked out loud. In theory, he should be able to see beyond what El saw of the Upside Down. She was only his anchor and the whole purpose of him being there at all was for him to be the metaphorical eyes in El’s back, but since they’d entered the Upside Down he’d been incapable of detaching himself from her. After two years of dreaming about it, the Upside Down had started to feel not quite real to him. It had infected his mind, poisoned his daily life, but no matter how many nightmares or flashbacks he suffered, once he got out of them he could find comfort in the real world. The Upside Down lived in his head and was only as powerful as he let it be. Even when he’d briefly been there with El a few days earlier he hadn’t really felt like he was _back_.

He was back, now. His eyes—El’s eyes?—had gotten used to the permanent semi-darkness again and he could see the black vines that covered the walls of the lab, branching like a set of dark veins. Even inside the building the snow-like spores floated down, shifting specks that danced at the corner of his vision field. El left the building and walked into the Upside Down version of the woods that edged Hawkins National Laboratory, the trees looming around them. In the real world, El’s steps would have made crunching sounds as her feet crushed leaves and branches, but in the Upside Down every sound was muffled. The fence that surrounded the lab looked rusted and wide holes had been torn into it, letting the thick black vines creep through and tangle with the metallic mesh of the fence. 

Once they got into the woods Will also started to _smell_ that distinctive Upside Down scent of damp and rotten and decomposing organic matter. Out of everything, it was that smell that had Will’s heart start beating faster. Was El the one smelling this? He had thought of himself as a sort of floating ghost hovering by her side, but with a growing sense of dread he looked down and saw _his_ hands, _his_ torso, _his_ jean-clad legs and _his_ sneakers. Had they been there before? Had Will just conjured an image of his own body? More questions crowded the narrow space of his terror-filled brain: could other things see him? Could _he_ , the shadow that haunted that his nightmares, see Will walking around, see that he’d finally come back? 

Will wanted to call for El and ask her whether she could see him, but his mouth opened and made no sound. His lungs tightened and his chest ached for air, his entire body locked in fear. It didn’t feel like his body was all the way over there at the lab, in the real world. He didn’t feel like he was sitting down crossed-legged on the floor, surrounded by his friends. He felt like he was standing in the woods, smelling the Upside Down air, watching El’s back disappear between the rotting trees. His lips mouthed her name, but he still couldn’t speak. His panic increased as he lost sight of El and found himself alone in the woods. Suddenly he could feel everything: the cold, the poisoned air, the sticky feeling from the black ooze that leaked from the trees when he tripped and caught himself with one hand on a trunk. He tumbled to his knees and the dampness from the rotten leaves that carpeted the forest ground seeped through the fabric of his pants. He could hear scuttering sounds coming from the woods around him, like something light and fast scurrying close to the ground. Not a demogorgon, then, but Will remembered that there had been other _things_ in the Upside Down and suddenly he thought he could feel all of them here, watching him, waiting for a sign of weakness on his part. 

He was still trying to breathe, still trying to get enough air to call for El, while a detached part of his mind sneered at him: _Look at you, trying to call for your superpowered girlfriend. Weren’t you the one supposed to protect her? Wasn’t it your whole purpose in this mission? You can’t even do that right._ Little by little, Will’s desperate gasping for air turned into breathless, almost maniacal laughter. He was so pathetic that there was nothing else to do but laugh about it. He’d managed to convince everyone that he could be useful, even himself, only to end up in the Upside Down, curled in a fetal position on a putrefying ground. Back at the beginning, where it had all started. Thinking he could be more than the terrible things that had happened to him, that he could turn them into something good, had been nothing but a cruel illusion. He could see it now.

His laughter subsided, just as his mind drained of emotions. One moment everything was too much, and the next the hard edges of the world around him had softened, like his mind was wrapped in cotton. He dragged himself over the ground until he could sit with his back against a tree, not caring much that he was getting some of that ooze on his clothes. He was breathing normally now, which was good. He should be getting up and try to find El, but he didn’t feel much incentive to move. There wasn’t anything he could do to help her, anyway; he was useless to anyone. He would just wait there until she came back—if she did. His fear was buried under a deep blanket and would only stir if he poked at it, which he absolutely didn’t want to do. Not doing anything sounded like the most appealing option he had at his disposal. 

Time didn’t make the same kind of sense in the Upside Down it did in the real world, and Will’s mind was detached from such an unimportant concept anyway. So he didn’t know how long he sat there until he heard a voice in his mind—not El’s, not the Mind Flayer’s, not his own self-depreciating commentary. It was Mike’s voice, sounding like it came from very far away, almost like a half-remembered dream. 

_I’m holding your hands; can you feel it?_

Will could feel _something_ , but it might have merely been his mind tricking him. His entire body was chilled, which he was only realizing now, except for his hands. They felt warmer than the rest and he could feel something brushing against them, but it wasn’t scary because he somehow knew what it was: Mike, holding his hands and giving them reassuring little strokes. Mike was still talking, but it was hard for Will to make out the words until something came through with abrupt clarity— _You two are the bravest people I know. I love you._ And then he was gone and Will was left with a racing heart and a renewed lucidity that hurt like hell.

 _I love you_.

Had he dreamed this? But whether he had or not was unimportant, because Will now knew exactly where he was and what he should be doing. He couldn’t see El anymore and for all he knew she could have been attacked while he’d checked out, effectively _abandoning_ her. He ruthlessly crushed the panic and the guilt that this last thought had triggered. He couldn’t believe that he’d just been sitting there enjoying his nice mind fog when El was relying on him, but feeling sorry for himself would just have to wait. He scrambled back to his feet, trotting up in the direction he’d last see her take, a frenetic sense of urgency sustaining him so well that he forgot to be afraid until he felt a familiar brush of cold against the back of his neck. _Hey there_.

Will froze up and held his breath. The Mind Flayer was there. He’d taken notice of Will. Out of all the possible things that could have happened during this trip in the Upside Down, this was by far the most frightening. Will’s first animal instinct was to run and hide, but then he remembered that his role was to steer the Mind Flayer’s attention away from El and Hopper. The Mind Flayer noticing him was a good thing, but it was all too possible that the monster could split his attention between several things. What Will needed to do was to make sure that he was the only thing that the Mind Flayer could focus on. 

His hand found the left pocket of his jeans where he fingered the bump made by the lighter he’d taken from his mom. It had been an impulsive gesture, something he’d done right before leaving for Hawkins National Laboratory, as El and Jonathan were making their own preparations. He hadn’t really understood why he’d felt compelled to take it until now. The Mind Flayer liked it cold. He _hated_ fire—as a proof of that, Will still bore a scar on his side where Nancy had burned him when she, his mom and his brother had been trying to get the monster out of him. The Mind Flayer was _not_ going to enjoy what Will was about to do. Will would enjoy it, though—he would enjoy it immensely.

The feeling at the back of his neck hadn’t gone, so Will knew that the Mind Flayer was still paying attention to him as he looked around, trying to find something that would burn. Unfortunately, although Will was in the woods, it didn’t look like the bushes or the dead leaves or the oozing trees would burn well. Everything here was damp or coated in that thick back liquid that smelled like a dying forest—or at least, everything but the clothes that Will had on his back.

His pants were wet and the parka jacket he had on would be hard to burn, as well as his woolen sweater, but underneath he wore a cotton t-shirt. Will unzipped his parka and took it off, then grabbed the collar of his sweater to pull it over his head. The back of his neck burned with cold, goosebumps blooming painfully over his skin; it was like the Mind Flayer was leaning over his shoulder, trying to get a peek at what he was doing. Will took off his t-shirt then, the skin on his torso and arms prickling from the cold and his jaw tightening against it. When he flicked the lighter and a flame flickered, the sense of _attention_ he got from the Mind Flayer became more pronounced.

“Oh, yeah,” Will said out loud, forcing his jaw to unclench. “You know what I’m going to do with this, do you?”

His t-shirt caught on fire easily, even a little too easily; when a flame flared up, Will had to drop the t-shirt to avoid getting burned. It was worth it for the piercing scream that shattered the Upside Down’s unnatural quiet. Instinctively, Will’s hands went up to protect his ears, but his ears weren’t what had perceived that sound. The t-shirt burned for a few more seconds, so hotly that it managed to ignite some of the dead leaves on the ground. The Mind Flayer screamed again and his telepathic cry blew up inside Will’s skull, the pain so great that for a moment Will couldn’t see anything, couldn’t feel the cold or smell the bad Upside Down air, every sensation being washed away by a big explosion of pain. It relented when the t-shirt stopped burning, and even though the relief from the pain felt so good that Will started to cry from it, he wished that it had lasted longer. He was okay with suffering if it meant that the Mind Flayer was suffering with him. 

Some leaves smoldered for a few seconds longer, but the t-shirt had burned too quickly to trigger a proper fire. As he put his sweater and parka back on, his teeth chattering from the cold, Will tried to think of what else he could burn. Sacrificing more of his clothes for thirty seconds of fire might not be worth the risk of hypothermia. Even though his real body was outside of the Upside Down, the sensations he was experiencing right now felt way too real for him to be confident that he couldn’t actually hurt himself. While he was mulling this over, a flicker of shadow at the corner of his eye caught his attention.

“El?” he called not too confidently.

His sense of the Mind Flayer’s presence was still as strong as before, even though he’d stopped screaming in Will’s mind. When he saw another flicker at the edge of his vision field, Will intuitively knew what it was: a dark, monstrous tentacle that was coming for him.

“Okay, think, _think_ ,” Will muttered to himself. “Don’t let him get you again.”

He didn’t know if the Mind Flayer could hurt him but it _felt_ like he could. Will’s real body at the lab with the others was the one that didn’t feel real. He had nothing to defend himself. Unlike El, he couldn’t blast the monster away with telekinesis. But… he didn’t fully have to play by this dimension’s rules, did he? Until he’d conjured it, he hadn’t even had a body here. Could he imagine other things to help fight the Mind Flayer? Buoyed by the idea, Will pictured himself holding a flame thrower that he could use to spit fire at the tentacle that was creeping up in his direction. When that didn’t work, panic arose in him again and he felt his lungs tighten.

“Okay, okay,” he murmured, finding comfort in the sound of his own voice. He wished Mike would start talking to him again. He would feel braver if he could hear Mike. “Maybe that was too big. Maybe I should focus on things I know and that I’ve held before.”

He had a lighter. The only thing he needed was something that would burn well and that he was familiar with. His mom used old newspapers when they had to burn leaves in their backyard, so Will imagined that he’d stuffed his pockets with dry newspaper pages, ready to be burned. He didn’t _feel_ them materialize, but when he checked his pockets they were indeed filled with wrinkled paper. The tentacle was almost on him now, so Will made balls out of a few of the pages, lit them up and then threw them at the ground in front of him. The tentacle withered and stopped, hovering for a moment, before slithering away from the fire and then around it, still aiming for Will, who threw more balls of burning newspaper at it to stop its advance. 

The newspaper burned quickly, but there was no shortage of new paper to burn in Will’s now bottomless pockets. The damp ground was slow to catch fire, but as Will kept throwing more burning paper at it the leaves and branches started to burn with a thick white smoke. The mental screaming from the Mind Flayer had started again, a shrill, continuous cry that felt like it was going to split Will’s head in two. Will dropped to the ground, covering his head with his arms in a pitiful attempt to protect himself. It did nothing to help, of course, but at least the pain had smothered his fear and now all he felt was scorching anger. 

He got more paper from his pocket and lit it up, then threw it blindly, his eyes crying from the pain and the smoke. “How do you like that, huh?” he yelled. He breathed smoke and was wrecked by a coughing fit, but couldn’t help shouting again, “Does that— _cough_ —feel good? Is it warm—warm enough for— _cough_ —warm enough for you? You _asshole._ Come—and— _cough_ —get me if you can!”

Through his tears, he could make out several tentacles twist behind the flames, snap in the air, like they were trying to reach him but couldn’t get past the heat. He could also see that he was now kneeling at the center of a ring of fire, but somehow all he could feel about it was fierce, violent elation. He’d done it, he’d finally gotten back at the monster that had invaded his mind and violated his body— _him_ alone, with no help from anyone else. He was hovering on the edge of unconsciousness, his mind shirking from the mental shrieking from the Mind Flayer and the agony it caused, but he held on as best as he could, knowing that if he passed out and the fire stopped burning, he would be entirely at the mercy of his enemy.

“What’re you— _cough_ —waiting for?” he called in a rusty voice that gave out on the last word. With a shaky hand, he lit up another ball of paper. 

Flames and shadows flicked around him, but his vision was too blurry for him to be sure of what was going on. Demogorgons cried out in the background, faint and distant against the Mind Flayer’s telepathic roaring.

_It’s up to you, now, El. You have to hurry up._


	7. Chapter 7

On the walk through the woods that separated the lab from Lovers’ Lake, it was so quiet that Eleven should have felt alone and isolated. Instead, she couldn’t shake off the feeling that she was being watched. She chalked it up at first to Will’s hovering presence, until she got the intuition that Will wasn’t there with her anymore. She stopped walking and turned around, but of course there was nothing to see but the skeletal figures of the shadowy trees around her. 

“Will?” she called.

He’d talked to her in her mind before, but now she couldn’t hear anything. Was he okay? Had the Mind Flayer gotten to him? She thought— _hoped_ —that she would have felt it happen. She waited for a few more heartbeats, wary of calling his name again in case she attracted the wrong sort of attention. She could try to look around for him, but since he wasn’t physically present, she most likely wouldn’t find him and would waste time that none of them had. The sooner she was out of here, the sooner they could wake him up from his trance and make sure he was okay. So even though it physically pained her to do it, Eleven ignored the pang of worry she felt about Will and resumed her walk toward Lovers’ Lake.

Mike and Dustin had equipped her with a map and a compass to guide her in the Upside Down, but she wasn’t so sure that the compass was working properly. From the boys’ explanations she knew that the needle was supposed to always point north, or at least to the strongest magnetic pole, but as she squinted at it the needle kept spinning madly, never pointing for long to one specific direction. With a shrug she put it away in her backpack; it was a precious object that the boys would want to have back, but right now it was useless to her. The map wasn’t much more helpful, because there weren’t a lot of details about the woody parts. Eleven had done the walk between the lake and the lab once so she could better orient herself once she was in the Upside Down, but in the dark it was hard to recognize the landmarks that she’d seen in the real world’s daylight. Well, that was fine. She didn’t need a map or a compass to guide her to Hopper. She closed her eyes, acutely aware of how vulnerable she was making herself but resolutely pushing the fear away, calmed her breathing and tried to feel for where Hopper was. 

It was just a little tug at the edge of her conscious mind, but since she had nothing else to go on, she tugged at the scarf around her neck so it would cover her mouth and nose and started walking in that direction. Her footsteps made almost no sound, but still she felt that she was being too noisy, like her presence was a disturbance in the Upside Down that every being here could feel like a ripple. She didn’t know if Will would be able to warn her if something was about to attack her and she didn’t have the uncanny sense he had of the Mind Flayer’s presence, so she tried to stay alert, to use her ears and eyes and intuition to protect herself. The drifting spores that permanently rained from above kept catching her attention, making her think that she’d seen movement. The quiet was slowly getting on her nerves—she _hated_ silence, and this particular silence was weighted with impending danger. Sometimes she thought she could hear the faint, muffled sounds of something moving through the bushes, or rapidly crawling over the ground, but she was never completely sure that it wasn’t her imagination acting up. The strong sense that something, or maybe several _somethings_ , was watching her made the back her neck tingle and she hoped that it wasn’t the Mind Flayer having an Eye out for her. 

Eventually the woods opened up to the vast expanse of Lovers’ Lake and Eleven started walking faster, her heart beating hard with how close she was from getting to Hopper. She could make out at a distance the pontoon that she’d seen during her mind walk with Will and used it as a landmark to get to the point where they’d emerged from the lake. She was so focused on it that the only warning she got was a thumping sound before a screeching monster jumped at her. 

It crashed into her side and pinned her to the ground. Its face opened like a flower, revealing its too many teeth, and it tried to get a bite off her head. She’d managed to keep her arms between their bodies and used them to push the monster away, just enough that its teeth snapped inefficiently, barely an inch from her face. The scarf that covered her nose and mouth was getting hot and damp from her breaths and it felt stifling, but she was also grateful for it because at least it meant that she wasn’t smelling the inside of the creature’s toothy maw. The demogorgon’s piercing cries of frustration felt like a stab through her eardrums, making it hard to focus. The monster was physically stronger than her and her arms were already aching. Its clawed hands dug into her arms and she could feel the pricks on her skin from where the claws had managed to break through her clothing.

_I can’t die! I can’t die here, can’t die now, not when Hopper and Will and everyone else need me. I can’t die right when I’m starting to have a real life!_

Under the fear, she could feel that familiar nugget of rage and frustration, always simmering behind her ribs. Her arms were shaking from the strain of keeping the monster from biting off her face. She ignored the fear, ignored the pain, ignored the anger too, reaching for the power that she knew was back. The memory of practicing her powers in the Byerses’ backyard with her friends encouraging her floated through her mind. Her friends thought she was cool, but they’d also remained her friends when they’d all thought that her powers were gone forever. _This_ was what Eleven was fighting for, for her right to be a normal person leading a normal life, surrounded by people who loved her even when she was crippled and couldn’t be of any use to them. She fought for those people’s survival and for her own too. One little demogorgon wouldn’t be the end of her. 

She usually shouted when she used her power because the surge of energy it gave her helped her tap into that part of her mind, but with the demogorgon pressing down on her chest it was hard to even breathe. It was almost a surprise, then, when she felt the power rush through her, through her chest, and explode out of her, sending the demogorgon flying. The creature let out a pathetic little yelp as it crashed into a tree, as though it couldn’t believe what his easy prey had done. It slumped to the ground, but it was still moving and Eleven didn’t waste any time clambering up on her feet, not eager to give the demogorgon the opportunity to get its bearings back and attack her again. She heard more distant shrieking and looked back to the woods, gasping when she saw the hunched silhouettes weaving their ways between the trees. She spun around so as to face the lake and ran toward it as fast her legs could carry her. The demogorgon she’d wrestled must have been chasing her, because she could hear the rapid thumping of a galloping creature. She resisted to impulse to look over her shoulder and check, instead jumping across the last few feet and into the water. 

The water not actually being water meant that it didn’t catch her and she found herself tumbling down the slope of the lake’s edge, ending up on all four at the bottom. Her knees and palms stung, but at least she knew that the monsters wouldn’t follow her down here, so she gave herself a moment to let her heartbeat ease to a normal pace before she got up. She let her feet guide her to where Hopper was, having the feeling that the more she thought about where she should be going, the more chances she had of getting lost. There was nothing at the bottom of the lake to help her orient herself. Trying to look at the shimmers from the not-water gave her a headache, so she stared down at a spot on the ground and started walking, looking up from time to time to see if she spotted Hopper. 

She wasn’t sure how long she walked, but her unchanging surroundings made it feel like much longer than the amount of time she’d taken to go from the lab to the lake. Since she didn’t have to worry about her own safety for the moment, she started to worry more about Will’s. _Something_ had pulled him away from her, be it an internal or an external threat. She wasn’t sure how much he risked given that his body was outside of the Upside Down, but even if he couldn’t get physically hurt, his mind could still take hits. Will was stronger than he gave himself credit for but he’d already been through so much; if this was the thing that broke him, then it would be Eleven’s fault for dragging him here. She’d thought she was helping but what if she’d pushed him to his breaking point instead? 

She was so distracted that she forgot to look up for a while and almost walked past Hopper. It was the sound of someone clearing their throat that alerted her. She startled, her head jerking up, and swept a glance around her to find the source of the noise.

“Hopper,” she murmured when she saw him, sitting on the ground about twenty feet away from her.

She ran toward him, then slowed down for the last few steps. Hopper didn’t seem to have heard her coming and she wasn’t sure how to approach him. She didn’t want to rush him too much, because who knew what his state of mind was like, but she couldn’t give him too much time either if Will was in danger. 

“Hopper?” she said softly once she was close enough that she was certain he must be able to hear her. “Hop, it’s me, Eleven.”

He raised his head and looked at her, but there was something vacant about his eyes, like he could see Eleven but didn’t consider her presence as real. She came closer and extended her hand, gingerly touching his cheek with the tips of her fingers. Even that light touch was enough to make him jump, and he gave her hand the same look you would give a hissing snake. 

“El?” he said, his voice quivering on the syllable. His eyes swiveled from her hand to her face, this time looking back at her for real. “I can—I can _feel_ —”

Eleven stroked her fingers up his face until her palm was cupping his cheek. “I’m here,” she said, feeling her eyes burn. “I came for you. I’m sorry it took me so long.”

“You were… It was _you_ , then. It was really you,” he said, his voice full of wonder. 

“Yeah, it was—I was—” Sobs were blocking her throat and it was becoming hard to talk. “I used Dustin’s radio, on the hill, to—to talk to you and I—”

Next thing she knew, Hopper had thrown one arm around her neck and pulled her in, shoving her face in the crook of his neck. He smelled sour and his skin felt grimy but she didn’t care—closing her eyes, she wrapped her arms around him and hugged him tight. He was shaking hard and making huffing sounds into her hair, half-muffled sobs; she was crying unrestrainedly, tears and snot wetting his skin and the dirty collar of his uniform. 

“Wait,” he said suddenly after only a moment of this. He pushed her away, grabbing her shoulders. “How did you get here? How did you—”

“I opened a breach into the Upside Down.”

“You did _what_?”

“It’s just a small one! And the others are guarding it so the monsters can’t get out. And Will is—” She cut herself off, biting her lip as she remembered how worried about Will she had been a moment ago.

“Shit, El. You shouldn’t have done this! It’s—” He thrust a hand over his eyes and dragged it down his face. “Sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry, kid. You came for me. You did a brave thing. I’m sorry I yelled.”

“It’s okay,” she said, hugging him again to show that she wasn’t upset. “But we have to go. Can you walk?” She remembered the demogorgons that had chased her into the lake and might be waiting for her to get out. “Can you run?”

“I can do whatever you need me to.”

She had to help him get up and keep one of his arms around her shoulders to support his weight as they walked across the lake. She told him the story of how she and Will had realized he wasn’t dead, but was trapped in the Upside Down, and how they’d planned his rescue mission. She _didn’t_ tell him about she, Mike and Will dating—she had a feeling that on principle he might object less to Will than he did to Mike, but he wouldn’t like the arrangement and this wasn’t the moment to get him worked up about something that was unrelated to them getting out of the Upside Down in one piece. As they approached the edge of the lake, Eleven told Hopper to stay down for a moment while she went to check if the way was clear. She only let the top of her head and half of her face breach the surface of the lake’s misty ghost water, just enough to be able to scan her surroundings. The woods next to the lake were once again wrapped in that eerie, muffled silence that reigned in the Upside Down. Had the monsters gotten bored of waiting for her to come back? Had their attention been drawn elsewhere? Her first thought was for Will and her second was for her friends in the real world—if one creature in the hivemind had noticed the breach, then it would have called for the others immediately. 

Her heard beating hard, Eleven hurried back to Hopper. “No monster,” she said to Hopper, “but I’m afraid they’re at the breach fighting the others. We have to hurry!”

She didn’t have to tell him twice, and together they emerged from the lake and walked into the woods at a hurried pace. Eleven was all instincts now, not wasting any time trying to make sure that she was going the right way, wanting to cover as much ground as Hopper was able to. He was leaning harder and harder against her, gasping and panting like a failing car engine, his weight threatening to make her collapse at every step. The woods played tricks on her eyes, the trees appearing as threatening silhouettes that popped up at the corner of her eye, dark and glistening with ooze, their gnarled branches like hands that were reaching out for her. A sound somewhere on her left startled her and her foot landed wrong, twisting her ankle in the process. She almost lost her balance but Hopper threw an arm across her chest and stopped her from falling.

“El, you okay?” he asked her hoarsely.

She took a cautious step, testing her ankle. There was some pain when she shifted her weight onto it, but not a lot, so she nodded to let Hopper know that she was good to go. 

“What’s that?” Hopper asked, pointing between the trees.

When Eleven looked, she saw a shifting, glowing light somewhere on their right, like a fire burning bright behind the veil of trees, a big contrast to the Upside Down’s usual darkness. A few distant growls echoed from the same direction.

“Will,” Eleven murmured.

“What?”

“It’s Will,” Eleven said, growing more certain of herself as she repeated it. She didn’t know how Will had managed to start a fire in the Upside Down, but she was sure he was involved in this.

“Will is _over there_? I thought he was—”

“Let’s go,” Eleven said. “Come on.”

“Shouldn’t we go help him?”

“He’s not really there. Come on!”

They started running. It wasn’t very efficient running and Eleven felt like she was dragging Hopper with her most of the time, not to mention that she narrowly missed twisting her ankle again a few times. But slowing down was out of the question. Being careful was out of the question. Eleven’s fear was a stabbing wound at the center of her chest that festered with a thousand of nagging thoughts: were her friends okay? Were they wounded, were they _dead_? And what was happening to Will? Had she made a mistake not going to check the fire? 

They came in sight of the massive bulk from the Hawkins National Laboratory’s buildings. Eleven saw a shadow scutter over the ground and slip into the lab’s lobby. She heard more growls and screeching cries coming from the inside. The demogorgons were there.

—-

Initially, they’d been saved by the fact that the breach El had opened was too small and narrow for a grown demogorgon to easily get through. Nancy, quick as a Wild West gunslinger, had shot the first few who’d tried it, which meant that the others had to climb over or shove aside the bodies of their fellow monsters before they could access the breach. Nancy’s marksmanship had truly astounded Mike—she must have been practicing, though he wasn’t sure when or where. She’d gotten the first three monsters in the head, killing them almost instantly, and her face was a severe mask of concentration that made her look like a stranger. Of course, multiple creatures trying to shove their bodies through the breach had damaged the reddish membrane that El had torn a hole into, making that hole bigger than it had originally been. Two monsters had managed to get into the room—they’d bludgeoned them to death and the bodies now lay limply on the cement floor. 

Nancy was still shooting without faltering, with only the shortest pause to reload when needed, like she’d been doing this her whole life. Mike had a long, shallow scratch from one of the monsters, that ran the length of his arm and stung like hell. Sweat ran down his face like tears and his heart beat hard in his throat. The cries from the other demogorgons that crowded on the other side of the breach had been a constant music for the past… ten minutes, maybe? It felt like a very long time, at any rate. Robin and Steve were standing on both sides of the breach, ready to strike the next monster to try its luck, Dustin and Jonathan were guarding Will, while Mike, Lucas and Max faced the breach. All of them were sweaty, disheveled, and Max was bleeding from her leg. Nancy shot twice at a monster, which slumped on the other side, and then diverted her eyes from the breach for a moment to reload, which was when Mike saw that the membrane below the opening was bulging, like something was trying to force its way through it.

“Look here!” he yelled, pointed at the membrane. “They’re trying to tear another hole!”

A demorgorgon slipped its head and one arm through the tear right when the membrane ruptured, revealing the dark head of another monster. Chaos erupted in the room—the two demogorgons jumped at Mike, Lucas and Max, and others gathered at the now larger opening. Mike barely had the time to see Steve and Robin swing their bats to keep more monsters from getting in before one of the demgorgons crashed into him. He fell back with a yelp and the floor kicked the breath out of him. His spiky bat, which he’d instinctively raised in front of his face for protection, kept his face from getting eaten, while his other, free hand clutched ineffectively at the monster’s slimy body. He tried to kick at it and managed to land a few hits, but the monster seemed to barely feel them. As Mike’s vision started to blur, his hearing sharpened remarkably, like his brain was trying to anchor him to consciousness with sound. He could hear screams and confused, shouted directions from his friends, his sister firing more shots, echoed by the quieter, popping sounds from Lucas’s toy gun.

And then, “Get off him, you fucking piece of shit, get _off him!_ ”

“Die, you fiend! Demon from the Abyss! Die, die, die!”

Suddenly, the weight crushing Mike disappeared and he was hauled to his feet by Max and Dustin, both of them red-faced and sweaty. 

“You okay, Mike?” Dustin asked, clutching his forearm tightly, like he wanted to hug Mike but didn’t think this was the right moment.

“Yeah,” Mike said breathlessly. “I think.”

His vision was spotted with dancing colors and was only clearing up now, and all he wanted was to sit down and give his thumping heart a moment to settle down so he would stop feeling like he was about to have a heart attack. But then he saw that Jonathan and Lucas were wrestling another monster, trying to hit it while dodging its blows. Mike shook his head to get rid of the colored spots. 

“A little—help—would be—great!” Robin shouted at the same moment. “More are coming!”

“Steve, you’re in my line of fire!” Nancy yelled. “Move!”

“Doing my best, Nance!” Steve yelled back, then screamed when one of the demorgorgons thrust an arm through the opening and clocked him in the shoulder. 

Mike looked from him to Jonathan and Lucas again, his attention torn between two hot spots of fighting, unsure who he should go help first. He hesitated until Max pushed him and said, “Go! We’re gonna help Lucas and Jonathan!”

Mike leaped forward but was stopped in his momentum by something catching his ankle. He staggered, almost pitched forward but planted his bat on the floor to keep his balance. When he looked back, he saw that the demogorgon that Max and Dustin had beaten up was still moving and was now holding his ankle, his grip strong enough to be painful.

“It’s alive!” Mike shouted as he tried to yank his ankle back. “Help! It’s still fucking moving!”

With a mad howl, Max charged at the prone body of the demorgorgon and started pummeling it with a fury that was frankly a little startling to witness. Each impact made the sickening dull sound of a tenderizer hitting meat while Max kept screaming the whole time, her red hair flying around her face. Something cracked and the demogorgon stopped moving but she gave it a few more hits before she stopped. Panting hard, she looked back at Mike with wide, crazy eyes.

“Can you—can you free yourself?” she asked, pointing at where the dead demogorgon still held Mike’s ankle. When he mutedly shook his head, she stooped and helped him unclench the scaly fingers. 

“Wow,” Mike said. “Remind me to never make you mad again.”

Max flashed him a broad, slightly deranged smile. Mike was hit by the urge to burst into hysterical laughter, but their friends were still fighting and he didn’t have time to lose it. Without another word to each other, Mike and Max got to their feet and split up, Mike running toward the breach to help Steve and Robin. 

Their only saving grace was that the monsters were in such a hurry to go through the hole that they kept getting in each other’s way. Like in a game of Whac-A-Mole, for every new head that they managed to bash in, another took its place. Mike’s arms burned harder than that time he’d tried to play baseball and he gained a few new scrapes from the teeth and claws on the demogorgons who were trying to fight their way in.

“Mike, watch out!”

Someone grabbed Mike’s collar and pulled him back, in time to avoid a claw that would have gotten him in the eye.

“Thank you,” Mike panted, looking back and seeing it was Lucas. 

“There’re too many of them,” Lucas said. “How long before El gets back? We can’t—”

Mike’s attention was diverted from what Lucas was saying when he heard Steve yell, “ _Shit!_ ” At the breach, another demogorgon had shoved half of its body inside; howling in triumph, it was using its teeth and claws to stop Robin and Steve from pushing it back. 

_No monster gets out._ This was the oath they’d made, and with a painful swallow Mike realized that they were about to make true of their word. With the adrenaline shooting through his veins he wasn’t sure how many times he’d been hurt but he could smell blood on himself and he was getting dizzy, from exertion and probably from blood loss too. Without a word to each other his friends had gathered around him in a line. Nancy shot at the Demogorgon, and it looked like she’d hit it but hadn’t killed it because it was still roaring, still lashing at them with its clawed hands. 

“I don’t have any more bullets,” Nancy said, her face pale and strained. 

_Where are you, El?_

The first hint Mike had of what was happening was the shrieks from the monsters on the other side of the breach that suddenly turned even shriller—and then he could hear another voice, young and painfully human, that was yelling in the background. The demogorgon that had almost entirely slipped its body through the hole was pulled away and disappeared on the other side with a yowl that was abruptly cut short. 

“Is that—" Max said.

“El!” Mike exclaimed and then ran to the breach to take a peek. In the semi-darkness on the other side, the only thing he could see clearly was El’s pale, bloody face. Without thinking about it he thrust an arm through the hole and shouted at her. “Grab my hand!”

“Mike!”

“What the hell are you doing, you idiot!”

“Careful, Mike!”

Ignoring his friends, Mike shook his hand and called for her again. “Quick, before more of them come!”

“Hopper first,” she said.

Mike had to pull Hopper’s massive body through the opening on his own, at least until Nancy and Jonathan came to help him. Hopper was conscious, but he moved sluggishly and his attempts to help them carry him were more of a hindrance. They sat him propped against a wall and then Mike reached out to El again. Her small hand felt so cold that Mike had the absurd, horrifying thought that he was holding a corpse’s hand. He hauled her out of the breach and she fell into his arms.

“El, El,” he said. Her hair had a peculiar musty smell, like a damp basement, but he buried his face in it anyway. “Oh my god, you did it. You’re back.”

“Mike,” she said, and at the brittle quality of her voice he knew that she was only just holding it together. “I have to close the breach. Before more come.”

He pushed strands of her hair off his face to look through the breach and saw movement on the other side.

“Yeah,” he said, reluctantly letting her pull away from his embrace. “Okay, do it.”

She turned away from him and faced the breach. The tear began to glow even brighter than before, its ragged edges looking like they’d caught on fire. One of the demogorgons tried to reach through it but the limb was retrieved quickly, as though the fiery edges actually burned. The opening slowly knitted itself back together until there was no trace of it left, only a bare spot of concrete that was indistinguishable from the rest of the wall. El collapsed in Mike’s arms and he clumsily pawed at her face, staining his fingers with her blood and getting a little panicky when she didn’t reply to his calls. Her face had the complexion of unbaked dough and her veins looked strikingly blue in contrast to her pallor.

“El? El, please say something. Are you okay? El!”

She looked up at him, her eyelids fluttery. “Will,” she said, her voice a thin whisper. “Wake up Will.”

“What did she say?” asked Jonathan, who’d been tending to Hopper with Nancy and Steve. “What did she say about Will?”

“She said to wake him up,” Mike repeated. He had his arms full of El, so he turned to Lucas and Max and told them, his voice high from a growing sense of urgency, “Go wake him up! Hurry!”

Jonathan had already stood up and crossed the room in a few strides, rushing to his brother’s side. Mike slipped an arm around El’s waist so he could help her walk and together they made their lopsided way to Will. Nancy and Steve stayed with Hopper, but the rest of the group clustered around Will and Jonathan, watching anxiously as Jonathan shook his brother’s shoulder and gently called his name. 

“Will? Hey, you have to wake up. It’s all right to come back now, kiddo.”

A full minute ticked by during which the only change that they could see in Will was the thin trickle of blood that made its way from his right nostril to his upper lip. Mike could feel the irregular puffs of El’s breathing against the skin of his neck, where she’d pressed her face, almost like she was crying. There was absolutely no warning sign before Will gasped and his eyes shot open. He doubled over and started coughing uncontrollably. 

“Will? What’s wrong?” Jonathan asked. “Do you have trouble breathing? Are you having a panic attack?”

Will was coughing too hard to be able to speak but he shook his head, then raised a hand, curling his fingers into the ‘O.K.’ sign.

“You’re okay?” Dustin said doubtfully. “You don’t look okay, buddy.”

“I—am,” Will said in a raspy voice, wiping his teary eyes with a trembling hand. “Just—the smoke.”

“What smoke?”

“Will set the woods on fire,” El said, sounding proud. 

“He did what?” Max said, eyebrows shooting up to her hairline. 

“How did you do that?” Lucas asked.

“Tell you later,” Will said, gesturing at his throat. He leaned against his brother’s chest but looked up at Mike and El with a small smile that Mike recognized as triumphant. “But, yeah, I did.”

He raised a hand, aiming at no one in particular, and Lucas, Max and Dustin gave him a high-five, one after the other. 

“Shit, Will,” Mike said. The adrenaline rush that had sustained him before was flagging and he felt cold, aching, tearing up in spite of himself. “I was really scared.”

“Sorry,” Will whispered.

“Don’t be stupid,” Mike said, sinking to his knees and throwing his arms around Will’s neck, pulling him away from Jonathan.

El had followed him down and her arms tangled with Mike’s while she hugged Will too, pressed against Mike’s side, the three of them so tightly intertwined that they were almost one body. Like El’s, Will’s skin felt icy to the touch but his breath was hot against Mike’s cheek. The desire to cry was a weight on his chest, a crushing feeling, but in spite of it the tears wouldn’t fall, maybe because he was too exhausted or because he was too dumbfounded by the fact that all of them had made it out okay. It didn’t feel completely real, and a part of him couldn’t help but think that a demogorgon was going to burst through that wall at any moment. The thought made him cling harder to El and Will.

“Aww, you guys,” he heard Dustin say, before he felt a weight against his back and an arm around his shoulders.

More arms were draped over them—Max and Lucas, joining the group hug. Mike’s nose was filled with the smell of several people’s sweat, of blood and of smoke, oddly enough. The press of his friends’ bodies made Mike feel more aware of himself, less like he was stuck in a weirdly vivid dream. He closed his eyes and pressed his face hard into Will’s neck, trying to get a grip on himself. Because he was hidden at the center of a pile of bodies and no one could see it, he gave Will’s neck a small, soundless kiss. 

He didn’t know how long they stayed like that, on top of each other like a pile of puppies, but Mike was called back to reality by Steve saying, “Uh, you kids are cute and all—long live the party and everything—but I don’t think we should stay here much longer. And Hopper should probably get checked at a hospital.”

Mike disentangled himself from his friends and looked back guiltily at where Hopper was sitting, feeling bad that he’d forgotten about him for a moment. The man was protesting that he was fine and would rather they take him home, but he looked too pale and haggard for them to believe him. 

“Okay,” Steve said, “here’s what I think: Nance, you take Hopper and the kids to the hospital and I stay here to…” He wiggled his fingers at one of the demogorgons’ broken bodies. “…clean up. Jonathan, you with me?”

“Uh, I want to go with Will to the hospital,” Jonathan said, giving Will’s head a stroke. “And I need to call my mom. We have to tell her we found Hopper.”

“I’ll stay and help, Steve,” Robin said.

“I’ll stay too,” Nancy said. “Jonathan will take Hopper and the kids.”

Jonathan and Steve had to team up to get Hopper up and moving—El tried to support him too, but she was too tired herself to be of much help. They got him to the car and settled in the back. Before Jonathan closed the door on him, Hopper said, “Wait.”

“Do you need anything?” Jonathan asked. 

“No, no, I just…” Hopper cleared his throat and his moustache quivered before he could speak again. “Uh, I just wanted, I. Thank you. To all of you. What you did was… okay, it was dangerous and you shouldn’t have—but no, no, what am I saying—thank you.”

He looked over Jonathan’s shoulder at El, Mike and the rest of the group, his eyes haunted by a shadow so deep that only Will and El could come any close to understanding it. Jonathan closed the car door and climbed on the front, while the party split up between the back and the front of the car. As Mike was climbing into the backseat with Hopper and his friends, his sister stopped him with a hand on his shoulder.

“Hey,” she said and then drew him into a hug.

Mike, unused to such shows of affection from Nancy, froze for a moment before gingerly circling her torso with his arms and resting his chin on her shoulder. It felt weird to realize how much taller than her he was now. On a normal day, he and Nancy were more likely to trade barbs than to cuddle, but this was a day on which they’d both almost died so Mike let his sister hug him for much longer than he ever remembered her doing.

“Okay,” Nancy said finally, signaling the end of the hug. “See you later. We’ll, uh, we’ll have to talk.”

“Yeah,” he said, remembering only now that she’d seen him kiss Will. “You were like Annie Oakley in there.”

Her smile was restrained, but only because she didn’t want to show how pleased she was with the compliment. “You did good too,” she said. “I’m glad I won’t have to explain to Mom and Dad how you were mauled by a monster from another dimension.”

“I’m glad _I_ won’t have to explain why _you_ were mauled by a monster from another dimension.”

It was a weak reply but it still made Nancy chuckle warmly. She kissed his cheek and then let him get on the car with the others. The drive to the hospital wasn’t a very long one but Mike managed to fall asleep, his cheek pressed against the cool windowpane. At the hospital, they let Jonathan handle the explanation on where they’d found a man who everyone had thought dead—in the woods, which made even less sense in this case than it had for Will—and why they all looked like they’d wrestled a pack of angry cats—a bear had attacked them in the woods, which Mike could have told him wasn’t a good lie since the last black bear sighting dated from 1871. Hopper was ushered away while other doctors checked their cuts and bruises, giving Mike and Max a few stitches and all of them rabies shots, probably worried about what could have made this mysterious bear attack a group of children minding their own business. 

Afterward, they waited for news on Hopper and for Joyce Byers, who Jonathan had called from one of the hospital’s phones. Max and Lucas fell asleep first, curled into each other, and then El fell asleep on Mike’s shoulder and Will fell asleep on El’s shoulder. Mike’s head was fuzzy with exhaustion and he wished he could fall asleep again and maybe wake up in his bed, like when he’d been small enough that his parents could carry him in their arms to his room. He wished he were Holly’s age and didn’t have to worry about monsters and relationships and how much homework he still had to catch up on. Jonathan was pacing up and down the length of the room, probably worried about how mother was going to react and maybe also about how Nancy and the others were doing. Dustin, who sat four seats away from Mike, was looking down at his shoes, not sleeping but looking pretty contemplative.

“You think we’re done with this shit?” he asked suddenly. 

“What?”

“You think we’re done with the Upside Down?”

“I hope so,” Mike said. El had fallen asleep with her hand in his and he gave her knuckles a quick stroke, like a ward against bad luck. 

“That’s what we thought the last few times too.”

“It has to end at some point.”

Dustin made a vague mumbling sound and looked at his shoes for a few more seconds before asking, “Hey, when you kissed Will at the lab earlier, was it the first time?”

Mike spluttered. Jonathan stopped walking but didn’t turn around, making Mike grateful that he couldn’t see his face. “What the hell, Dustin? Why would you ask me that?”

“Oh, it’s just that I got worried that, you know, you thought that you couldn’t kiss Will in front of us because we would give you shit about it. I mean, when you started dating El nothing less than a crowbar could have separated the two of you. So, I just meant to tell you—not that we want a peep show or anything, but you know that we wouldn’t be assholes about you and Will acting like a couple, right?”

“Right,” Mike said. It was both sweet and really freaking weird that Dustin had given this much thought to the topic. “Thank you. And no, it wasn’t the first time.” 

“Oh, good.”

They lapsed into silence again and Mike dozed off for an undetermined amount of time, waking up with a jolt when Joyce Byers barged into the waiting room, her hair wild and her jacket buttoned wrong. 

“Mom,” was all Jonathan had the time to say before Joyce grabbed him by the neck and hugged him fiercely. 

“You’re all right, you’re all right,” she said, then pushed him back to look at his face. “What were you _thinking?_ Why didn’t you tell me what you were about to do? How could you let your brother—”

“Mom?” Will mumbled, still half-asleep.

Joyce let go of Jonathan and rushed to her younger son’s side. “Oh, baby,” she said, cupping his face in her hands and then enfolding him in her arms. “You feel so cold. Are you okay?”

“I’m fine, mom,” Will said.

Joyce had jostled El and woken her up—without releasing Will, she grabbed El too and hugged them both for another long moment. Max and Lucas woke up too, groaning in protest, and Joyce hugged every member of the party, short rough hugs that she punctuated with whispered, fragmented tirades, “So _stupid_ —why would you—don’t _ever_ do this again— _thank you._ ”

“Mom,” Jonathan said gently when she was done with her hugging spree and was hastily wiping her eyes. “You should go find a doctor and see if they can tell you about Hopper. We’ll talk later.”

“Oh, you bet we’re gonna have a talk, mister,” Joyce said, pointing an angry forefinger at her son. “A long, serious talk.”

“Sure, mom,” Jonathan said with a weary smile.

Joyce left like a whirlwind in search of someone who could tell her how Hopper was doing. Mike fell asleep again and woke up to a conversation between Joyce and Jonathan, from which he learned that Hopper was physically doing much better than he should have been after months lost in the woods. Mild hypothermia, dehydration and malnourishment, but not as bad as it could— _should_ —have been, which reminded Mike of the fact that when Will had been trapped in the Upside Down he didn’t seem to have eaten or drunk for a week, but hadn’t died of thirst or been too badly malnourished. At the time, they’d theorized that the Upside Down slowed down your metabolism and Hopper’s case appeared to confirm that. _Huh, interesting_ , Mike thought, and his tired brain filed that information in a corner—even though he hoped never to have to deal with the Upside Down again, he always liked to understand how things worked.

Nancy, Robin and Steve arrived at the hospital and each got a hug and a whispered lecture from Joyce. By the time they got their own wounds taken care off, the evening had given way to nighttime and Mike started to give some panicked thoughts about having to go to school the next day.

“You’re not going to school tomorrow,” Nancy said. “I had Mom on the phone. All of our parents except for Joyce think that we’ve been attacked by a bear. No one is going to school—I mean, _I_ ’ll go, because I’m the only one who didn’t get hurt and I don’t want to miss an entire day of school if I can help it, but you’re certainly not going, Mister six stiches.”

Steve drove Robin, Nancy and Mike back home while Joyce took care of everyone else. As his he let his mother fuss over him, Mike guiltily wondered for the first time what would have happened if they’d all died stopping the monsters at the breach. They’d probably have been declared missing at first, because no one would think to look for them at the abandoned lab, and it would have meant days or maybe weeks of anguish for their parents, like it had been for Barbara’s parents. Joyce Byers would have been the only person able to guess what had happened and she would have been left with the hard choice of keeping the truth to herself or telling the other parents about it. 

Mike fell asleep as soon as his head hit the pillow and if he had any nightmare about what had happened, then he didn’t remember any of them when he woke up the next day around noon. He called his friends on his walkie, but only Lucas and Max were awake. Mike talked to them for half-an-hour before getting up to look for food—he didn’t have to look very far because his mother had prepared a huge breakfast for him. She kept insisting that he ate more, like he was the one who’d been found after months of going missing rather than Hopper. Once he found himself incapable of taking one more bite, Mike felt a bit at a loss, unsure what to do with the rest of his day now that he’d dealt with the supernatural emergency. He had a huge pile of homework that needed to be done but absolutely no desire to get to it now, and his friends were all resting at home.

“Mom,” he said, “can I go to Will’s? I want to check on him and El.”

“Are you sure you’re feeling up to it, honey?” his mother asked, cupping his face and then his forehead with a hand, as though checking his temperature.

“Mom,” he complained, turning his head to escape her hand. “I feel fine.” It occurred to him that he couldn’t feel _too_ fine, though, because then his mom might decide that he could attend his afternoon classes, so he added, “I mean, I still hurt a little but I can handle it.”

“Do you want me to give a ride?”

“No, I can bike there. I won’t short-cut through the woods, I promise.”

“All right, then,” his mother said with a sigh. “But you can’t spend the night. If you’re feeling okay, that means you’re going to school tomorrow.”

“Yes, mom.”

Mike wasn’t surprised when Joyce Byers opened the door, even though she generally worked on Mondays—with Will and El both down for the count, she must have taken the day off.

“Oh, hey, Mike,” she said, leaning against the doorframe and pulling the front of her cardigan over her chest. “Will and El are both sleeping.”

“Oh, okay,” Mike said. 

He’d assumed they were, because they hadn’t answered when he’d called them on the walkie, but he was confused by the way Joyce had presented it as a rebuttal. He was reminded of last year, when Will had been getting possessed by the Mind Flayers and Joyce had tried to hide what was happening. Mike thought that Joyce wasn’t going to let him come in, but after a few seconds she moved away from the doorway, nodding her head at him. 

He followed her into the kitchen with the uncomfortable feeling that something was wrong. She puttered at the sink and the cupboards, asking him if he wanted something to eat or to drink, how he was feeling after the events of the previous day.

“No, thank you,” Mike said stiltedly. “I’m fine.”

Joyce stopped her nervous fussing and leaned her weight against the sink, her back turned on Mike. “I had a conversation with Will and El last night,” she said.

“Oh,” Mike said, a lump growing in his throat.

So he hadn’t been imagining things—there _was_ something wrong, something that made Joyce unhappy and more specifically unhappy with _him_. He frantically wracked his brains for what it could be, and the first thing that came to mind was that Will and El had told Joyce about their plan to save Hopper and how Mike had pushed the ‘no monster gets out’ angle. Maybe Joyce was holding Mike responsible for her kids almost dying. 

But then Joyce said, “They told me about your relationship.”

“Oh, uh, yeah, we—” Joyce hadn’t sounded like she was happy about it at all and it made his stomach twist. “I’m sorry,” he said helplessly. “I’m sorry.”

She turned around, and at the look on his face her own expression softened. “Oh, honey,” she said, sitting at the kitchen table across from him. “I didn’t mean to upset you. You’re a good boy, I know that. You’ve been such a great friend to Will.”

Mike could remember her saying those exact same words to him last year after the Mind Flayer debacle, but at the time the words had been full of warmth and gratitude. A bit of that warmth could still be felt now, but mostly it looked like Joyce was disappointed. It gutted Mike to be the source of that disappointment, almost as much as it would have if he’d let down his own mother. The scrape on his forearm, the most serious of his injuries, was starting to ache under the painkilling blanket from the pill his mom had given him earlier.

“I know you don’t mean to hurt anyone,” Joyce said, reaching across the table to put her hand on top of Mike’s. “But Will and Eleven have both been through so much. They’re still dealing with the consequences of the things that have happened to them and will probably have to deal with them for years to come. They don’t need more… complications. You understand that, do you?”

“Jo—Mrs. Byers,” Mike said, his voice trembling a little. Last year, she’d asked him to call her ‘Joyce,’ but he wasn’t sure he was allowed to do it anymore. “I promise I don’t want to hurt Will and El.”

“Of course you don’t. I know you don’t.”

“And I… I don’t know what’s going to happen with our, uh, relationship. I don’t know if we can make it work. But I _want_ to. I love them. Not just El—I’m in love with Will too.”

Joyce looked at him with wide, wet eyes, biting her lower lip like she was trying to stop herself from crying. “Sweetheart,” she said in a heartbroken voice. “It’s not that I think you don’t love them. But—"

“And Will and El both have had their share of being controlled by others.”

Joyce had a movement of recoil, as though he’d slapped her, and she withdrew her hand from his.

“I’m sorry,” Mike said, afraid he’d gone too far. “I didn’t mean to imply—”

“No, no, you’re right,” she said. She closed her eyes and pinched the bridge of her nose with a deep exhale. “I don’t know what to do. You’re all so young. This feels like a disaster waiting to happen. But Will was telling me this summer that he didn’t think that he would ever fall in love and now you—” She waved in Mike’s direction, her head turned away from him. 

It was awkward, watching an adult fall apart, and Mike wished he could make some excuse to leave and go home. They had to finish that conversation, though, because he had to know whether Joyce was going to stop them from being together or not. He had no choice but to sit there, squirming on his chair and waiting to see what she was going to decide.

“But then,” Joyce said, sounding like she was talking to herself more than to Mike, “I can’t imagine it going well if I tried to stop Will from seeing you. And should I try to separate Will and El too? I can’t do that as long as El is still my responsibility.”

Mike held his breath, not daring to say a thing for fear that reminding her of his presence would sway her way back in the other direction. A door whined and when Mike heard soft footsteps, he twisted around in his chair to look at whoever was coming, his heart jumping from happiness at the thought of seeing El or Will.

It was actually both of them. They were obviously just getting out of bed, with faces wrinkled from sleep and still wearing their pajamas. El was rubbing her eyes and gripping the hem of Will’s pajama top, as though she needed his help to guide her through the house. 

“Mike!” Will said, his face lighting up. 

“Hey,” Mike said.

Will’s eyes went from Mike to his mother and then back to Mike, the expression on his face growing wary. “What were you talking about?”

Mike glanced at Joyce, waiting to see what she was going to tell her son.

“Nothing,” she said. “I was just asking Mike how he was doing.”

She gave Mike a tired smile, but there was something soft and accepting in her eyes. Mike blinked to chase tears from his eyes, washed over with a wave of relief. The last thing wanted was to fight Joyce Byers to be able to keep his relationship with Will and El. 

“Mike?” Will asked, too perceptive not to realize that something had just happened and too smart not to have an idea of what it might be.

“I’m fine,” Mike said. “Still kind of tired. My arm hurts a bit. How are _you_ feeling?”

Will shrugged and said, “Eh,” which in Will speak meant ‘not great.’

“Tired,” El said grumpily. 

“Do you want something, sweetie?” Joyce asked. “Milk, hot cocoa? Something to eat?”

“Hot cocoa,” El said.

“Boys, what do you want?”

“Hot cocoa sounds nice,” Will said.

Mike had said no to a drink earlier, but the mood had shifted and sitting down with Will and El to drink hot cocoa sounded pretty appealing now. “Same,” he said.

“Well, all of you sit down and I’ll get that ready for you.”

Joyce buried her head in the fridge, looking for milk, while Will and El sat down at the table, El kissing Mike on the cheek and Will sliding a hand over the back of his neck as they walked by him. 

“Everything okay?” Will whispered to Mike.

“Yeah,” Mike said. “Everything’s great.”

They looked at each other while Joyce prepared hot cocoa for them and Mike suddenly felt that this was one of those moments that he should commit to memory so he could play it again on rainy days—remember the halo of messy curls around El’s head, the creases of the pillowcase etched on her cheek, the way a solitary ray of sunlight hit Will’s eyes and injected green into them. Remember the burn from his healing wounds and the way that physical discomfort worked as a perfect counterpoint to the hope in his heart. How everything seemed manageable now that Joyce had sort of given them her seal of approval, the future bright and open with endless possibilities. How much he loved El and Will, how impossible it seemed that this love could ever dim or that he could love anyone else. 

Reality would catch up with them soon enough. Right now, Mike was as happy as anyone could ever hope to be.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next chapter will actually be an epilogue, so it won't be as long as the others. Expect something pretty fluffy, though.


	8. Epilogue

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is just a short piece of fluff, but I hope you enjoy this epilogue!

“Mike! Get out of the bathroom!” Nancy let out a short, exasperated breath through her nose, before closing her fist to better pound on the bathroom door. “You’re not the only one who has to get ready for the dance! Mike!”

“Just a minute!”

“You said that twice already!”

“Another minute, then!”

Nancy stomped her foot in frustration. Since when did Mike care so much about his looks anyway? Last year, they had to nag him all afternoon so he’d consent to wearing a suit for the Snow Ball. Of course, last year he’d thought he would only attend the dance with his guy friends—El showing up had been a surprise, and at the time Will had just been a friend. That he was more than that now was something that had caught Nancy completely off guard. She’d been a little miffed to realize that Jonathan had been aware of Mike and Will’s relationship before she was, and only the fact that he’d learned it by accident had appeased her. She and Mike might not always get along perfectly, but she hoped he knew that he could trust her with that kind of thing. 

Hogging the bathroom for close to an hour was really pushing the limits of her good will, though. “If you don’t come out in thirty seconds, I’m calling Mom! One, two, three, four—”

“All right, all right!”

The door flew open, and Nancy had to bite her lip to contain her reaction at the vision it revealed. Half of Mike’s hair was flattened against the right side of his skull while the rest was tousled in a very unflattering way, like Mike had thrust his fingers into a plug.

“Don’t laugh,” Mike said in a low warning tone. 

“What have you done?” Nancy asked, her voice strangled from her effort to contain her laughter. She reached out—when had he gotten so ungodly tall?—and buried her fingers into Mike’s thick mop of hair; it felt coarse and sticky, and she wiped her fingers on the back of her other hand with a grimace. “Ugh, you used way too much gel.”

“Will you help me or not?” he asked through gritted teeth. 

She almost protested that she had her own preparations to make, but decided that she would waste more time fighting about it with him than if she helped him out.

“Fine,” she said with a sigh. “Come on, we’re going to wash that stuff off your hair.”

She pushed him back into the bathroom and led him to the sink so she could wash his hair. “What were you trying to do? You know that you absolutely cannot pull off Steve’s hair style, right?”

He mumbled something that was lost to the rush of running water and the weird distorting echoes from his voice bouncing against the surface of the sink. Much less ambiguous, though, was the middle finger that he raised at her. She pulled his hair in retaliation, just hard enough to get a startled ‘hey!’ out of him.

“Remember that I’m holding the fate of your hair in my hands,” she said. “Literally. But seriously, if you were trying to do your hair to impress El and Will, then I have to tell you that they’re probably not with you for your sense of fashion.”

“Very funny,” he said. 

“Just trying to help. Up now, I’m done.”

She handed him out a towel to dry off his dripping hair. He looked unhappy, something deeper than simple grumpiness from his hair failure. They rarely talked about anything personal, but if she never tried then she wouldn’t have room to complain when he hid again from her big developments in his dating life.

“What is it?” she asked. “Why the mopey look?”

“You wouldn’t get it.”

“Well, try me.”

“It’s just—” He let out a heavy sigh, way too weary for a fourteen-year-old boy. “Officially, I’ll only really be going to the ball with El as my girlfriend. Not with Will. He’ll be there, of course, but just, you know. Just as another member of the party. It’s not like I _need_ to dance with Will—”

“But you still want to.”

“It’s stupid, I know. We’ll be going as a group, anyway, and Dustin’s girlfriend isn’t even there. We can still have fun.”

“Doesn’t mean that it doesn’t suck, though. Okay, easy with the drying, you’re gonna make your hair all puffy. Let me help, we’ll just comb it.”

Taking care of Mike’s hair barely left Nancy with enough time to do her own hair and makeup, but at least by the end of it he looked more relaxed and ready to have fun. At seven, Jonathan came to pick her and Mike up. On the backseat, El was vibrating with excitement at the prospect of the dance. Hopper had come out of the hospital a couple of days ago and she would move back with him soon, so those were the last days she would spend at the Byerses’. Nancy had only heard echoes of the storm resulting from him learning about the turn El’s relationship with Mike and Will had taken, because the kids had waited until he’d left the hospital to tell him, but she knew he’d needed all of Joyce Byers’ force of persuasion to calm down and let El have those few days. 

Will, for his part, looked pretty subdued for the whole car ride. As a rule, he tended to act more subdued than his friends and even more so since the Upside Down, but Nancy wondered whether he was sad about El not living with him anymore or about not being able to openly go to the dance as El and Mike’s boyfriend. When they arrived at the school, the kids perked up as they met with their friends. The party detached itself from Nancy and Jonathan, shooting off to the other side of the dancing area. This was perfectly fine—Nancy and Mike had a pact of non-aggression for this sort of thing, each of them agreeing to mind their own business at a reasonable distance. Nancy dragged a long-suffering Jonathan on the dance floor. He didn’t like to dance very much, but the music had slowed and what they were doing couldn’t really be called dancing, as they were just gently swaying together in each other’s arms. 

“Your brother looked a bit withdrawn,” she told Jonathan after a moment. “How is he doing?”

“It’s sometimes hard to keep track of Will’s moods,” Jonathan said.

It was a cautious answer, that didn’t mean that Jonathan didn’t know more, but just that he would respect Will’s privacy if he did.

“Mike told me before the dance that he was kind of disappointed that he wouldn’t get to dance with Will.”

“Well, maybe they could—”

“You know they can’t, Jonathan. It’s hard enough for them at school as it is.”

“You’re right,” Jonathan said. “Still…”

“It sucks, I know.”

Robin and Steve showed up a little later in the evening. They’d obviously come together and since Steve wasn’t a student at the school anymore he couldn’t be anything but Robin’s date. Steve had sworn to Nancy that there was nothing between him and Robin and that there would never be anything, so that was strange, but Steve’s love life wasn’t any of her concern and she did her best to curb her curiosity. She couldn’t help glancing from time to time in her brother’s direction: she saw him dance with El, of course, then one time with Max, and Will and El danced with each other, but Nancy also caught some of the longing looks the boys exchanged. It was frustrating not to be able to do anything to help them; if she’d had the power to change people’s minds by snapping her fingers, she would have made use of it a long time ago. 

When they needed a break from dancing, she sent Jonathan get them drinks. She idly eyed the dancing crowd—she caught sight of Robin and Steve twirling madly around each other, looking like they were having the time of their lives, and over there—was that El and Max dancing with each other? And then, more surprisingly, Nancy saw Dustin dragging Lucas by the hand to the dance floor. The boys looked nervous and moved stiltedly—they wouldn’t win any dancing prize, but their intention was clear.

Jonathan came back with two cups at that very moment and Nancy told him, “Jonathan, look.”

“What are they—oh.”

“We have to help them,” Nancy said, grabbing the cups from his hands and putting them on the closest table. 

She saw Robin and Steve strolling up their way, probably taking a break too. Well, too bad. When they’d joined Nancy and Jonathan, Nancy grabbed Robin’s hand and told her, “Let’s dance.”

“Wh—what?” Robin stuttered, her pale complexion flushing suddenly. She hurriedly pulled her hand out of Nancy’s grip. “What the hell, Nancy?”

“Look at what the kids are doing,” Jonathan said, pointing at the party. “They must be trying to give Mike and Will a chance to dance with each other. If we do the same—"

“So let me get this straight,” Steve said. “Or—not so straight, I guess. You—” He turned to Nancy. “—would dance with Robin, which mean that I—”

He looked at Jonathan, giving him a long, serious look, as though he were contemplating marriage rather than just a dance. “Jonathan, will you allow me—”

“Oh, stop playing and get to the dancing,” Nancy said, pushing him toward the dancing area. 

Nancy felt some reluctance from Robin at first; it was true that the two of them didn’t know each other very well and she wasn’t all that close to the kids either, but as the four of them made their way across the crowd to where Mike and his friends were, she followed without protesting. 

“Looks like you’re having fun over here!” Nancy shouted to the kids, loud enough to be heard over the music. 

“I don’t know if _fun_ is exactly the way I would put it,” Dustin said. 

They were drawing looks, especially the boys. Curious looks, mocking looks, and some frankly hostile looks. Mike and Will were standing at the edge of the dancing floor, Mike crossing his arms at the wrists in an ‘abort!’ gesture.

“Mike, come on, don’t be a chicken!” Max yelled. “Come and dance with us!”

“Mike, Will, come on!” El echoed. 

Nancy turned decisively toward Robin and held out her hand, while Steve did the same with Jonathan. A new song started and it was fast and upbeat, so it was easy to be silly and pretend the rest of the students weren’t there. Max and Dustin whooped loudly when Will managed to get Mike to join them, and from then on, the group just switched partner at every song, sometimes taking a same-sex partner, sometimes an opposite-sex partner. Eventually they stopped being the center of attention and Nancy even saw other friend groups do the same thing, until it wasn’t so noteworthy to see a guy dancing with another guy. By the time another slow dance song rolled in, Max was dancing with Steve, Dustin with Robin, Jonathan with Lucas, and Nancy with Eleven—so it didn’t look all that weird for Mike and Will to have this dance with each other. 

Someone had dimmed the lighting for a cozier atmosphere, the semi-darkness peppered with glittering lights from the mirror ball suspended above their heads. Nancy’s feet ached from all the dancing she’d done and she was glad for the slower pace. In front of her, El didn’t seem very tired and she kept glancing over Nancy’s shoulder. When Nancy twisted her neck to have a look of her own, she understood that El was looking at Mike and Will. The boys had their arms around each other, although they were keeping a certain distance between their bodies, and from that angle Nancy couldn’t see Will’s face but she could see how widely Mike was grinning. He leaned to whisper something to Will’s ear, which made Will hit his shoulder. Mike laughed, and Nancy was struck at how open her brother’s expression was. She hadn’t realized how used she’d gotten to seeing him look sullen or angry.

“Hey,” she said to El, trying to get her attention. “You okay?”

El looked over Nancy’s shoulder for a little longer before meeting her eyes. “Yes,” she said, “Everything’s perfect.”

Nancy had wondered for a moment if El wasn’t getting a little jealous, but her smile was vibrant and guileless, the sort of smile you couldn’t help responding to in kind. She wasn’t so naïve as to think that tonight’s dance meant that Mike and Will wouldn’t need to be careful with each other anymore at school. All they’d managed to accomplish was to make everyone think that they were just having fun messing around with their friends. But to see her boyfriend and friends having fun, to see her little brother smile, to see El’s peacefully happy face, when the girl had suffered so much in the past, made Nancy nod along. 

“You’re right,” she said. “Perfect is the word.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is the end, thank you to everyone who read, kudo'd or commented!


End file.
